Academic Management

Introduction

As stated in the general politics, Free Software techniques are considered a key factor in the success of the to be executed Application Software sub-projects described in the following sections.

The general principles applying to all of them can be resumed as following:

• Every Software product created in the process is not only available to UNI, but to anyone who wishes to use it
• Existing Free Software product are considered as prioritised solutions and/or starting points for our own application.
• It is desired and actively supported, to have a large contributing community. Our Application Software programmers understand themselves as coordinations and facilitators rather than as the only knowledgeable specialist in the matter.
• Early and intensive involvement of the end users and their ICT-confidants is allowed, desired and actively promoted.

A project steering team has to be constituted for each Software project, with two crucial roles to be fulfilled by adequately selected persons

• Organisational Management

  This role preferably has to be taken over by a person, working in the target area or group for which the application(s) are to be developed. His/her role is the coordination of knowledge rising about the problem domain and the broad involvement of the end-users in all fases of the Software development cycle. The taker is preferably a knowledgeable, experienced person from the top management of the involved area.

• Technical Management

  This role is taken either by a contracted senior programmer, or by a member of the inhouse application software department of CORC. It is also allowable that a teacher or researcher from the computer science department takes this role, if it seems appropriate with respect to the necessary time involvement. The role has to coordinate the programming tasks and supervise and lead design and implementation decisions. It is also responsible for release management and timelineing.

Instead of installing individual database and application servers a scalable server farm dedicated to the academic management will be installed. Main components will be

• a professional database management system like PostgreSQL, capable of access control, large scaling, replication and database backup ease.
• Webserver with a variety of application support like php, php-groupware, Zope, and a fine-grained robust authentication system, as well as secure socket layer support.
• Security and privacy Software: intrusion detection, encryption software, VPN capability, etc.
• Availability and Backup facility - independent UPS, RAID 5 (at least), remote backup server, etc.
• Implementation servers, with similar functionality, but less access and security restriction, used for off-production development of the applications.
• User authentication system: magnetic-strip-card, chip-card, or similar system to provide students, visitors and staff with electronic/visual authentication media to the services to be provided. Includes card-printers/burners, card-writers and card-reader terminals, as well as the respective software.

Eric Steven Raymond has provided us with essential insights about the Free Software development processes, find here the extract of his thesis of the paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar":

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterised quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognising good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realising that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and *never* throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Note:

items 15 to 17 are rather technical then conceptual.

Academic records

Introduction

Global availability data about students identities, their enrolment, admission, registration, transfer, graduation, payment status, etc. is a key requirement for efficient administration, because of its impact on all university entities: Senate, Colleges, Faculties, Departments, Student Services, Finance departments, etc.

The Academic records systems (see also ARIS, http://www.makerere.ac.ug/makict/documents/policydoc/annex1/aris.html), is conceived to improve availability, accuracy and speed of access on all levels to this data.

A submodule mentioned in the ARIS analysis is the course registration and class scheduling system.

It should be noted here, that this submodule overlaps with a not-mentioned area worth of providing with ICT recourses - maintenance and infrastructure. At UNI a thesis is actually being development which implements a maintenance workflow system for equipment maintenance, based on free software components. Infrastructural planning and maintenance could well be worth a subsequent step and ARIS should scale to it.

Goals

• Creation and modification of computerised records about students enrolment, movement, payings, degrees, notes, etc. are realised at the place of creation of the respective data.
• Access to required student data at a specific workplace is possible via the desktop computer at the location and at the moment required.
• Privacy and Security of Student data is assured by an appropriate policy and by organisational and computational means to make the system comply to it.
• Resource planning and scheduling with respect to: courses, teachers, classrooms and media are aided by a respective planning sub-module.

Project components

A long term project team shall be established, which tackles all aspects of improvement and automation of academic registry. This team is part of and supported by the politics outlined in the last ten year plan of the UNI.

Privacy and security policies for the handling of personal data will be elaborated and made part of the official rules of UNI.

A student database will be envisioned and developed, with primary use for the academic registry.

A database access facility for the Faculties will be provided, easing the access to relevant student data for all faculty staff members according to their function.

Other components will be added either by acquisition or development, according to most felt needs and priorities.

Project organisation

A UNI top management member, preferably from the academic registry , will assume the role of project leader, to which one member of the CORC's Software application department will be associated as technical manager.

The teams sticks to the guidelines laid out in "Directrices, Metas y Presupuesto 2001", and it's follow up documents, as well as to the outlined politics in the ICT project.

Additional engineering resources are assigned or hired according to the momentary needs of the sub-project.

Project Costs

About 10 Workstations/Terminals for end-users US$ 5000,-

External functional and managerial support: US$ 50000,-

Library

Introduction

As before, similarity is found to the project outlined in http://www.makerere.ac.ug/makict/documents/policydoc/annex1/maklibis.html.

However in the latin-american context adherence to the well known and widely used Micro-ISIS and the support provided by Bireme/Brazil is heavily advised in contrast to a "home-made" solution.

The focus of the project is to be found in evaluating weaknesses in the Micro-ISIS' Software and Organisational Solution, and contribute by closing gaps and by assistance to a nation- and continent-wide integration and interchange of bibliographic data and technology. Eventually interoperable products have to be envisioned.

Value should be added to the actual library services, by integrating faculty and department/institute libraries into a global cataloguing system, as well as promoting use of the library and associated services in research and education.

The actual tendency toward free available resources (see MIT's publication project) shall be assessed both by providing resources to the INTERNET (see other sub-projects) and by acquiring access and promote use of the public libraries and information sources. A search engine and database with focus on spanish literature and papers shall be installed and maintained and promoted as preferred information source among the academic community in Nicaragua. The public computer facilities of the library are to be expanded, component which is outlined in the communication infrastructure sub-project.

Goals

• automation of the loan system of the library with use of electronic authentication media in combination with the students database.
• MicroISIS library system is fully functioning and interchange to other universities as well as organisations of the public and non-governmental sector in Nicaragua and Latin America is done on a regular basis.
• Teachers use and promote the library services and recourses in research and education.
• Use of remote search engines are widely substituted by the own knowledge lookup database.
• The library is equipped with extensive public computer facilities (terminals) for individual use, meeting regular demands of use.
• Regular courses to the university public in the use of the library services are organised. They form part of the standard curriculae of the students.

Project organisation

Project leadership is taken over by the library personnel in first place. Preferably external resources should be hired to provide installation and training of MicroISIS, this training should preferably coordinated or shared with national institutions involved in library activities like documentation centres and special interest groups, as well as the national association of libraries.

For the expanding of the local computing infrastructure of the library and the search database, contact with CORC's Network and Software Application department will be sustained.

Technological requirements

• Server for Bibliographic database, plus networking and availability Infrastructure (UPS, Air Conditioning, grounding)
• MicroISIS
• Server for search machine and database, Software
• Training for library staff and end-users.

Project Costs

Acquisition, training, installation, maintenance and distribution of MicroISIS: US$ 3000,-

External Contracts: US$ 25000

Two Servers: US$ 4000,-

UPS and Network Infrastructure for Library Server: US$ 1500,-

Acquisition, Subscription Costs to information services, etc. for the search machine and database: US$ 3500,-

Additional training and research fund for library staff to know and participate in meetings, talk, workshop about online library management: US$ 4500,-

Financial Information System

Introduction

The respective section in the Makerere Document is

http://www.makerere.ac.ug/makict/documents/policydoc/annex1/finis.htm

the to be implemented system is called "FINIS":

"Financial management of the university encompasses a number of closely related administrative and managerial processes. These processes involve monitoring and analysing the university's financial conditions, general and special account management, budgeting procedures, preparing financial statements and reports, payroll/income tax calculation and salary payments, and managing cash flow."

At UNI, financial information and improvement of the managerial and administrative procedures is part of the existing mid term strategic plans. The "FINIS" project will integrate into the efforts made at institutional level.

At present the implementation method is not decided. On one hand the creation of a financial information systems is a very specialised task and there are commercial solutions, both free and proprietary available. On the other hand, it is known that the organisational structure of the UNI is sufficiently sophisticated to break any existing standard accounting package. Public and private education forms, assessment of multicurrency external cooperation projects as well as a wealth of different course type: standard, postgraduate and long distance courses, with different payment methods and certifications, plant lecturers, contracted and guest lecturer, etc. etc. are a real challenge for integration into one system.

Goals

• Major administrative cost factors, within the findings of an organisational improvement phase, are analysed and alternative solutions encountered. Wherever adequate, supporting computational systems will be acquired or developed.
• The personal authentication system (chip-card/strip-card) is used as a common medium for registration of accounting data at the point of incident. The resulting data merges neatlessly into the general accounting system.
• Economics and involvement indicators common to universities, are defined and extracted directly from the accounting and financial information system by predefined report mechanisms. Additional reports can be defined easily by trained inhouse personal, preferably at the administrative departments themselves, otherwise at CORC's application software department.
• Short term project management and financing/accounting integrates into the financial registration, processing and information system. Support for planning, and acquisition fase is integrated into the system, as well as budget planning.

Project organisation

The institution level team assigned with the re-engineering of administrative procedures is supported by one dedicated person at CORC's software application development department. The role of this person is not precisely implementation of software, but rather research assistance and coordination of corresponding sub-projects.

Technological requirements

• Application Server Farm
• Authenticating System (Strip-Card/Chip-Card)
• Upgrade of computer equipment and conditioning (Grounding, uninteruptable power supply, air-condition, etc).

Project Costs

Software implementation and introduction costs: US$ 250000,-

15 Computers: US$ 13500

10 printers, including special equipment for Strip-Cards, anonymous forms etc. US$ 2500,-

Conditioning of facilities: US$ 7500,-

Note: Makerers calculus assigns less resources to the financial system then to the library system. This does not seem feasible to us, as the latter is much more standardised and instant applicable systems are available, while any financial software is bound to have great introduction and adaptation costs.

Human Resources

Introduction

The human resource information system, boils down to a personnel data base with connection to other administrative systems like academic registry (course planification), financial/accounting system (payroll), and some extension, like training planfication, staff evaluation, recruitment and discharge.

"A Human Resource Information System and Payroll Information System encompass a number of closely related processes supportive to human resource management. In particular they include maintenance of employee records, the quantitative and qualitative forecasting of capacity, allocation of human capacity, the calculation of salaries and, in accordance with established policies and procedures, the provision of management information. ..."

http://www.makerere.ac.ug/makict/document/policydoc/annes1/huris.htm

The human resources system can be seen almost as a sub-component of the financial information system, however is considered as prioritised because of its immediate impact on resource assignation, and the overlapping function between academic registry and payroll system.

Goals

• A comprehensive electronic database system complements paper-based files about all university staff. Replaceable functions of the current systems are substituted complete by the computer system.
• Course planning and academic registry is supported by the staff database
• Payroll functions of the accounting systems are supported by the human resources database with data about contract time, extra hours, absences, vacations, etc.
• Human resource planning functions for academic and non academic areas of the university are supported by the human resource system.
• Privacy and Security of the registered data is assured by both, a policy document, validated by the university council as well as the corresponding computational security means.

Project organisation

The human resources department forms a project team together with academic registry and the accounting department, to define the data registry approach and reach, as well as for preparing proposals to the privacy document.

Technological requirements

• Application Server Farm
• Authentication System (Chip-Card, Strip-Card)
• Upgrade of computer equipment, as well as conditioning for the expanded needs of availability.

Project Costs

Software implementation and introduction costs: US$ 35000,-

10 Computers: US$ 9000,-

5 Printers: US$ 1000,-

Network update, environment conditioning: US$ 2500,-