Introduction of Data Management Technologies at the 'Progressive University'- Perspectives on Information Technology Planning and Implementation in an Academic Institution

摘要

The Progressive University is a private, urban university in one of the Midwestern states in the US. It was founded in the late 19th century and has a history and heritage of undergraduate liberal arts education. At the graduate and doctoral levels, it has a number of programs in business, information technology, law, social science and education. Over the last five to seven years, the university has been transformed from a largely regional university with an emphasis on educating mostly undergraduate students from the local urban and metropolitan areas and neighboring states, to a nationally ranked university with a number of graduate and doctoral programs that leaned more towards academic research. Moreover, changes in the local and regional economies led to significantly increased student enrolment, program diversity and new faculty recruitment. Interestingly however, the IS architecture and IT infrastructure in the organization were based on technologies more than two decades old, and had not developed over the years in any significant manner. The IT infrastructure evolved from the use of punch cards in 1972, to the development of a Cobol based file system in 1983. The record keeping system that existed at the beginning of this study was an upgraded version of this file-based system. It was centered around four major file systems catering to Student Records, Employee Records, Financial Records and Human Resources Records respectively. Being file based, it was slow and inflexible and new programs could not be added for fear of increasing the complexity. It also suffered from problems of data duplication, poor data quality and lack of data integrity. Some departments used local database packages (MS Access, for example) to run customized queries and access locally stored information. There was no organization wide database management system.