Executive Summary

From January through June of 2000, the OSU Office of the CIO, with a core team from OSU Human Resources, Anderson Consulting (now Accenture), the Office of Finance, University Hospitals, the Research Foundation, Student Affairs, Enrollment Services, and Procurement engaged in the End Use qr Access Assessment Project. The core team was assisted by dozens of university staff members from organizations such as OSU Libraries, Development, University Relations, and Business Services.

The goal of the project was to identify and evaluate a small portfolio of simple-to-implement end-user self-service extensions to existing PeopleSoft and legacy administrative systems. End user extensions would work with existing systems and allow individual users to access and update their own administrative information. The assessment project was completed successfully and identified three self- service opportunities: OSU should develop hardware, software, security, and interoperability standards to reduce overall university costs, more effectively employ university IT staff, and reduce reliance on scarce and hard-to-duplicate and replace esoteric IT skills; OSU should adopt a software development process including change control, documentation, and testing methodologies; and, the OIT Help Desk hours should be extended. However, the recommendations of were not implemented. The deliverables included an intensive inventory and profile of much of OSU's technology infrastructure, especially system development tools, databases, and server configurations. The inventory and profile was intended to assist tool and infrastructure component selection by identifying common campus components and to assess infrastructure support levels for implementation. From this effort, data were developed to characterize OSU's broadly decentralized and distributed environment. The inventory was based on 65 administrative applications, 27 teaching and learning applications, nine healthcare applications, and four research applications.

The PlanIT Current State Assessment Team reviewed the project reports and obtained and re-analyzed the inventory and profile source data for the strategic planning initiative. While the data indicate significant variations in commonly used university tools, there are common threads pointing toward collaborative training and standardized software opportunities. In addition, the project overall report clearly identified a need for university-wide IT standards and guidelines to facilitate better and faster system development, support interoperability and control costs.

End User Access Assessment Inventory -- Hardware and Software

With respect to software, the dominant program languages observed were Javascript and Perl at 20% each, followed by C/C++ (18%), Visual Basic (14%), and Cold Fusion (9%). The most popular authoring tool was Front Page (34%), followed by Dreamweaver at (18%). The most frequently used databases are SQL Server (N = 14) and MySQL (N = 6). OSU legacy mainframe, Data Warehouse, and AS-400 databases followed driven by the application need to access legacy data or systems. There was a broad desire for campus-wide support for richer and more capable database such as Oracle or DB2. However, software and support costs were a barrier. The most used security method at 47% was Action Remedy/Kerberos, an OIT campus-wide system incorporated into many applications to control access through the OSU name.n identifier and password.

For web server distribution, Apache (N = 19) and Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) (N = 15) were the most popular. The predominant web operating system is NT (N = 24), with Solaris following (N = 10). The web hardware picture is mixed and varied with generic Windows on Intel (WinTel), Sun, HP and Dell having roughly equal shares.

The application server picture is even more mixed with SQL/MySQL (N = 5) and WebCT (N = 4) the most frequent. However, 14 other types of application servers were also observed. The predominant application operating system was NT (N = 13) with Linux and MacOS next (N = 4). The major application hardware supplier is Intel/HP (N = 5) with seven other suppliers noted.

The project report pointed out that over 15 different application development tools, ten different application server products, six different web server products, and myriad hardware platforms were in common use throughout OSU. This inventory points out the broad range of choices local units made in OSU' s distributed and decentralized environment. In most cases, the choices represented a locally optimized decision. In some cases, procurement costs were lower and long-term maintenance costs were not a concern. In others, the decision matched the skill sets of the local staff.

A graphic depiction of the PlanIT Current State Assessment team re-analysis of the original inventory data are available below as links. See the original End User Access Assessment Project documentation, reports, and recommendations; the most germane documents are Final Report - Overview and Final Report - Technical (especially pages 105-119).

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