The Pennsylvania State University - Administrative Information Services, a unit of Information Technology Services

Strategic Initiatives

Strategic Initiatives have long been part of Administrative Information Services (AIS) planning; however, in recent years, these initiatives have been recognized as separate processes. In 2001, AIS began to define initiatives that are deemed essential to support strategic planning and which, in turn, could generate specific projects. This section describes on-going strategic initiatives.

Services

Business Intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence (BI) is a multi-year initiative, with the goal of planning, designing, developing, and implementing an infrastructure that will transform administrative data into information and then make the information available to the right Penn State stakeholder at the right time through the right delivery media.

EASY Re-engineering

EASY Re-engineering is a multi-year initiative to replace the current EASY (Electronic Approval System) forms (the 3270 mainframe screen) and approval paths (a user-based routing mechanism consisting of over 7,800 approval paths) with Web-based forms, workflow, and streamlined role management. EASY Re-engineering will increase efficiency and effectiveness in the processing of financial and human resource information, matching new technology with re-engineered business processes.

EASY re-engineeing partners with the Workflow service. For more information, please refer to the Workflow service page.

Project Management (PMO)

The Administrative Information Services (AIS) Project Management Office (PMO) is composed of three full-time project managers and has a two-part mission, with the overall goal of improving the delivery of systems and services to the Penn State Integrated Administrative Systems community.

The first part of the mission is to provide professional project management services for administrative systems that involve major modifications, or the replacement of, core administrative systems. These are typically multi-year projects, such as the Social Security Number (SSN) Conversion. Current projects include Systems Development Modernization, Workflow, EASY Re-engineering, and the Payroll Modernization Project.

The second part of the mission is to establish a repeatable process or methodology for AIS staff to use in all project work, with a project being defined as any work request estimated to require at least 40 hours of effort. This project methodology is active and is continually refined so that AIS can improve its track record of systematically initiating, tracking, and completing projects to meet the needs of our customers on time and within budget.

A project collaboration spot has been established on Penn State’s wikispaces, which serves as a centralized location for collaborating on documents and providing the meeting agendas, notes, and follow up that is critical for communication once a project is underway.

For more information on the PMO, please visit the AIS PMO Wikispace.

Supporting Documents

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