Campus Computing News

EIS News

The Jaguars are coming!

By John Hooper, Executive Director of Administrative Information Systems, CITC

Soon there will be a new addition to the EIS family! As with the earlier additions to the family, there will be labor involved and a significant gestation period.

Seriously, UNT has had a presence in south Dallas since 2000. Under Texas state law, the UNT Dallas Campus can become a free-standing, four-year university when student full-time equivalent enrollment reaches 1,000. The UNT Dallas facility has been in operation since the spring of 2000. It has grown steadily and opened a beautiful new facility on Houston School Road in Dallas last year.

In the fall of 2008, the UNT Dallas campus reached 959 full-time equivalents, an 18 percent increase over the fall of 2007 figure of 814. John Ellis Price, Ph.D., Vice Chancellor of the UNT System and Chief Executive Officer of the UNT Dallas Campus said the upswing in enrollment illustrates the demand for a public university in Dallas. The increase also makes it clear that UNT Dallas will be opening as its own university in 2010, the target date approved by the UNT System Board of Regents last spring.

“The train has left the station,” Dr. Price said. “UNT Dallas is coming and it is coming in fall 2010.”

EIS is the primary administrative information system for the UNT System. We currently support the three official entities of the UNT System – the system itself, UNT in Denton and the UNT-Health Science Center in Fort Worth – that existed when EIS became live in the fall of 2003. The processing for UNT-Dallas is currently done under the umbrella of other UNT entities. UNT-Dallas employees and students are part of the other UNT entities’ business units, institution ids, and setids in the PeopleSoft nomenclature. Their data is processed along with the data of the other UNT entities.

In the fall of 2010, a significant change will occur when- UNT-Dallas becomes an independent entity. It will be a new and separate state agency just like the other UNT System entities, and will have its own version of EIS within the overall EIS application. The UNT Dallas version of EIS will have its own configurations, table setups, processes, reporting requirements, gateway portal, etc. Even though UNT-Dallas will be smaller than UNT for some time to come, most of the same processes have to be established. The volume of data (students, employees, etc.) is much lower but the functional requirements to support UNT Dallas are not proportionately less.

There is an implementation project now underway to bring up the UNT-Dallas version of the major EIS applications – finance, human resources/payroll, student administration and portal. Although we plan to clone many of the decisions and processes that have been established for UNT, there will still be significant configuration, conversion, testing, interfacing and reporting efforts required to go live at UNT Dallas. Some requirements that will be unique to UNT-Dallas must be addressed through configuration and customization.

In closing, please join me in welcoming UNT-Dallas to the UNT family. They are fortunate to be joining a family that is dedicated and committed to the success and continued enhancement of EIS for the benefit of our respective institutions and the UNT System.

Staffing changes in Administrative Information Systems (AIS) 

A number of changes are occurring within AIS, the last being finalized Monday, September 1. 

1. The Contributor Relations Systems Development Team (CRDT) that is skillfully led by Jeri Takimoto is moving to the Finance and Administration Systems (FAST) Group. Jeri will report to Dorothy Flores, FAST Assistant Director. The CRDT has many interactions with finance and is mostly independent from the student applications. As the Student Services Group has grown explosively, I felt the need to have the Assistant Director over that group be able to concentrate exclusively on student applications. CRDT is the logical candidate to move out of the Student Services Group. I do want to thank Don Butler, Student Services Assistant Director, for his able stewardship of the CRDT team and also thank Dorothy Flores for taking on this important responsibility. 

2. Multiple elements of the Data Warehousing & Reporting Infrastructure (EISDW) Team are moving outside of CITC to the Decision Support Group that is lead by Will Senn. The Decision Support Group reports to Jean Bush, Interim Senior Associate Vice President for Finance. This change reunites the EISDW resources that support and populate the data warehouse with the group that is responsible for developing business intelligence solutions for the university.   AIS will continue to support the applications software, Cognos and Informatica, which support the data warehousing and business intelligence services.  Kevin Cox, EISDW Team Manager, is remaining with AIS in a new role as part of the AIM team to provide the support for the applications infrastructure. 

The remainder of the EISDW team (Jacob Brown, Kala Chevli and Shane Pierce) is transferring to the Decision Support Group. Speaking on behalf of AIS, we appreciate their dedicated service to AIS and to the data warehousing initiatives at UNT. Their efforts have been critical to advancing the business information services at UNT so far in a short time. I know they will continue to do great things in their new organization.

These changes are effective immediately although the EISDW Team will not physically be moving until space is secured elsewhere in their new group.