Juggling stakeholders, vendors, and complex internal integration points

I am in the middle of a 2+ year program at Ohio State implementing a third party housing application. Our program originally consisted of two major phases and many sub projects. The goal was to replace an old mainframe system that manages housing assignments with a very new, very slick COTS software that would bring our housing department into the current century. One major challenge, however, is that the central IT department at Ohio State is also moving from a mainframe student information system (SIS) to a new sort of COTS version of PeopleSoft. In order to mitigate risk of simultaneous Go-Lives with the Housing and central SIS system, we implemented the housing system in two phases. Phase 1 was implementing the new housing system and Phase 2 is currently under way, which is converting all of our interfaces to work with the new SIS system. I will not go into too much detail in this post, but I am sure you can imagine the undertaking of converting 10,000+ bed spaces from a mainframe application to a SQL Server powered web application. The application also manages campus dining plan selections, additional monies deposited on campus debit cards, and door access privileges. We have since expanded to manage summer conferences services. I could probably write a solid book on everything we have done and what we have learned, but the purpose of this post is to introduce a presentation that I submitted to ACUHO-I. Below is the extract. Hopefully it is accepted. Once we get the green light, I will be sure to post updates here. I plan to actually perform a juggling act during the hour long presentation… so I have a few months to learn how to juggle.

Title: How to juggle stakeholders, vendors, and integration for a housing system deployment.

Participants will: listen to the pros and cons of moving to a third party housing application from a home grown system.

Participants will: learn about some of the complex integration challenges between a third party application and internal systems such as other home grown mainframe applications, PeopleSoft, and BlackBoard.

Participants will: learn how to balance the difficult juggling act of managing stakeholder expectations with vendor and technical constraints.

This program will be an overview of Ohio State’s journey from using a home grown mainframe application to managing housing assignments with a third party system. We will briefly cover where we came from and what we are capable of doing today. Ohio State offers a unique perspective on some of the pros and cons of both a home grown application that has been customized over the past 30 years and also using a powerful third party application. The presentation will include hurdles we have overcome and challenges we continue to face including vendor management, stakeholder expectations, and some complex integration points with various university systems. We will also touch on the massive undertaking of migrating over 10,000 bed spaces from one system to another and how business processes and personnel have adjusted to a new way of doing things.

Presentation Outline: This presentation will be a standard Power Point delivery, with some comic relief to keep the audience engaged. Time permitting, we will have a brief question and answer session at the end.

• Overview of existing mainframe application
• Vendor selection method
• Benefits of and decision to move to StarRez
• Hurdles we overcame moving to StarRez
• Challenges we continue to face
• Vendor management
• Data integration management
  • PeopleSoft
  • BlackBoard
  • Mainframe Applications
• Meeting stakeholder’s expectations, including students