Long May You Run: Keeping That Old Enterprise System On the Road

Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 | 2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. CT

Delivery Format: Interactive Presentation

It’s hard to find anyone who really likes their old enterprise system. Most universities have some mix of student information, financial, and human resource systems that were designed in the 1990’s, installed in the 2000’s, and seeming obsolete today. Some institutions have invested in moving to new modern systems, but this migration is a highly costly and disruptive step. Is there an alternative strategy that can defer these costs while still meeting the needs of a university in the 2020’s? Surprisingly, we believe that its both possible, and responsible, to extend the life of the legacy system.

In this presentation I will outline our architecture and share our experience with the first steps in building this architecture. In particular, I will describe our project to develop a RESTful API Integration Layer, as well as our hybrid cloud strategy and our cloud resident data lake. The extreme requirements of our environment suggest that if we can pull this off, many other universities can do the same. If successful, we will assure that our enterprise systems can meet our needs over the next decade and perhaps longer while saving 100’s of millions of dollars, resources better dedicated to our mission of support student success.

• Technologies & Trends – Are you leveraging such things as cloud services, artificial Intelligence and machine learning to support teaching, learning, administration or research at your institution?
• Collaboration – How are you facilitating or supporting collaboration between people, in teams, within institutions, between institutions or with others in the sector?
• Big Data/Data Analytics – Are you leveraging big data or data analytics to help your institution achieve its goals and objectives in areas like student success, retention, research, etc.?

Speakers