Hundred-year-old Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology is entering a new era of easy access to corporate information and automation of business activities. It follows a year-long process of coming up with a business driven information strategy, which is now beginning to be put into effect.

Mark Marshall, Director of CPIT’s ICT Division, says the strategy was a response to the Chief Executive’s demand for better information access.

“Over a period of time there was a growing recognition that the way in which information was available to manage the business was not supporting the business particularly well,” Marshall says.

IS Manager Dean Patfield was put in charge of developing the information strategy, a non-technical document based on business needs identified through consultation across the organisation.

“It was very much a business-level strategy around what information we needed to make available to the organisation, and how, when and under what circumstances. It took nearly a year to write that, revise it and have it signed-off at executive level,” Marshall says.

The result was a strategy document that told them the tools the business was lacking. Top of the shopping list were a data warehouse, and a platform for integrating CPIT’s various business applications.

IBM ended up satisfying both requirements: CPIT is deploying IBM’s data warehouse solution (InfoSphere DataStage); and to fulfill the application integration requirements is deploying WebSphere Process Server.

“These two knit closely together for us,” Marshall says.

DataStage extracts information from a number of polytechnic systems — initially the financial, HR and student management systems, and eventually the time-tabling and asset management systems — and merges it.

The goal, Patfield says, is to provide “a single source of the truth”. That’s in contrast to the “various flavours of the truth” that results from the manual massaging of information staff perform at present when creating reports, in hundreds of spreadsheets and databases.

“The first phase of deploying DataStage is to build a financial datamart, which will allow drilling down from the organisational level to individual departments, businesses, cost centres and, finally, transactions. Once combined with student management and HR data, that will enable costs to be quickly calculated for a particular course of study,” Marshall says.

“You can start to really drill down and understand where the costs and benefits in the organisation are, which is all done manually — and onerously — at present.

” But what Patfield calls the backbone of the business — “and, as such, we made a conscious decision that we wanted something with good solid support” — is WebSphere. It will do for CPIT’s workflow what DataStage is doing for information.

As a service oriented architecture (SOA) platform, WebSphere opens the way to look at CPIT’s systems as parts of a business process, rather than as discrete applications.

Marshall describes it as a “translation engine” between applications. And according to Patfield, he thinks there are few limits to the applications that it can tie together.

“From what we’ve seen the capability to integrate with other business systems is unrestricted,” Patfield says.

WebSphere is being put to use initially to create a repository of financial, student and HR information around particular programmes of study, in the first instance to go on the web for student use.

“But because it’s enriched with information around financial and human resource requirements, we can start feeding back into professional development of our staff, feeding back into programmes or courses that are under-utilised, and start flagging to the organisation programmes or courses that are potentially being overcommitted, so action can be taken,” Patfield says.

At the moment all those actions are major papershuffling exercises, or may not happen at all, because there are no visible links between the different processes. And once automated, process efficiency can also be readily measured.

Reducing the labour component of routine processes should also free staff to deal more effectively with students who have difficulties of one sort or another.

WebSphere delivers “workflow on steroids”, Marshall says. He can envisage it being used to integrate systems as diverse as those for control of building security, lighting and air conditioning, with course enrolment and room scheduling systems.

Armed with its information strategy and newly deployed technical architecture, Marshall says CPIT is equipped to take the business in whatever direction it needs to.

“One thing I keep saying is that this isn’t in any way about ICT leading the business into ICT solutions, this is about understanding and getting people to think about what the business needs and us enabling it.”

For more information
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