Office of the CIO Annual Achievement Report

Collaborations / Facilities / Infrastructure

While the Office of the CIO spearheads and carries out many information technology initiatives and central planning, it readily acknowledges the impossibility of doing so unilaterally. Collaborative leadership and teamwork are essential to envisioning, creating, and maintaining a stable technology environment for infrastructure, central services, and enterprise resource planning systems that serve the entire campus. Mutually beneficial relationships among stakeholders, and activities that do not fit precisely within any of the 15 strategic initiatives, comprise this section.

Completed the PeopleSoft Human Resources system 8.9 upgrade and an upgrade to support the open enrollment period, on time and under budget; began annual merit and compensation process changes, prior expenditure transfer enhancements, role audit and SSN remediation, and year-end processing; saved money by being the first upgrade to use all university staff, other than support; laid the foundation needed for SIS by implementing the Human Capital Management version of PeopleSoft; and stabilized post-upgrade in the shortest period to date.

Continued work on the PeopleSoft Financials system: installed direct deposit of employee reimbursements; purged data in accounts payable, purchasing, general ledger, and inventory to seven years of transactions online; and began planning for the Data Warehouse purge project and year-end 1099 processing.

Completed an eReports production system hardware upgrade to increase user resources for the Data Warehouse and PeopleSoft Human Resources; upgraded simulation and development environments to allow work to begin on a base software upgrade; created eReports version 8 simulation environments to support the Finance Data Warehouse rollout; developed new scripts, procedures, and administrative queries; replaced production Windows servers with new 64-bit machines; revised web servers strategy; tested an upgrade of eReports and moved to System 9; and upgraded the Hyperion license to System 9.

Established Buckeye Alert, the university’s emergency notification system with Public Safety, which, in the event of a crisis or disaster, sends audio and text message alerts through Ohio State’s telephone, cable television, and e-mail systems and to cellular phones registered on a campus web site.

Began the Campus eProcurement Project covering supplies, non-computer hardware, catering, furniture, and temporary employment services. The project remained significantly under budget through the testing phase with a planned full campus rollout in early 2008.

Moved the new University Travel System (release 4.0) into production on schedule with changes to online travel processing and reimbursement and separate initiator and approver roles for compliance with audit and control policies recommended by the university’s external auditors; and issued an RFP for a web-based university travel system replacement.

Completed updates to the University Development and Alumni Association Impact System to expand contact information into one system and implemented SSN masking for database queries.

Modified the Campus Campaign report of the AlmaMater System to include new employee information and e-mail addresses; streamlined the file transfer process on the igive web site; expanded prospect tracking to enable single grouping of families; implemented encryption/masking for OSU security compliance; and enabled electronic forms for USPS address correction.

Optimized central e-mail system architecture to improve mass e-mail delivery time, which helps speed emergency mass e-mail. Results show that it now takes less than one hour to deliver OSUToday to 27,000 faculty and staff, down from five to six hours.

Improved the technology environment of the Office of the President by upgrading the events system and moving it to the web so that other departments may use it; and developed plans for a new document management system.