Campus Computing News

By Claudia Lynch, Benchmarks Online Editor

Enterprise Information System Selection Status Report,
Part Two

As Dr. Leatherbury reported last month, UNT is currently in the process of selecting a new "Enterprise Information System." The plan is for this EIS system to eventually replace virtually all of the aging administrative systems on campus. Over the next three or four years, according to the current plan, these systems will be replaced and, finally, our IBM mainframe computer will be decommissioned. So, goodbye to SIMS, HRMIS, NOBIS, CEATS and any of the other acronyms associated with UNT administrative services that we've grown know and to love. This is the point when we will truly have a "UNT System." It will be shared by the Health Sciences Center, the Denton campus, and the future UNT Dallas campus.

Vendor Presentations

As was noted last month, three responses were received to our Request for Proposal from vendors of software designed to provide solutions to higher education institutions such as ours. The three responding vendors were Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SCT. You can see the RFP as well as a lot of other information about the EIS, including the membership of the various committees, at the site dedicated to the project (http://www.unt.edu/eis/EIS_Homepage.htm).

All three vendors gave overview presentations the week of November 12. If you missed one or all of these, they will be available via streaming video from the EIS Website soon. More detailed demonstrations of the vendor products will be held in the coming weeks, during December and January, in key areas throughout the university. The plan is to have a decision about which system or systems will be recommended to the Board of Regents to purchase, including implementation services vendors, by mid-January 2002. The vendors have been told that we may purchase "best of breed" products (the student system from Vendor A, the human resources system from vendor B, for example,) so it's possible that UNT will end up with contracts with more than one vendor. If all goes according to plan, we hope to have wrapped up a contract or contracts and can start the process of acquiring the software and hardware necessary to run the new system by late February, 2002.