Shared services ideal for merged tertiary institutions

Regional shared service centres are the most rational way to support SA`s new clustered tertiary education model with IT infrastructure, according to Mike Coppin, software sales director at Oracle South Africa.

Education will be on the agenda of this weekend`s Presidential International Advisory Council on the Information Society and Development (PIAC) meeting in Cape Town.

Tertiary education institutions have traditionally relied on self-standing systems developed in isolation from other institutions. However, the new merged universities and universities of technology (formerly known as technikons), present the ideal opportunity for shared IT services and the standardisation of university data models.

The University of Oslo in Norway currently manages a single computing infrastructure for itself, the University of Bergen and the Technical University of Trondheim. This gave the universities a single production, testing and business infrastructure run by a team of technical staff. Each university maintains a separate reporting database, and business intelligence tools to mine and interrogate the information.

Championed by the minister of education, Kader Asmal, and approved by cabinet in 2002, several higher education institutions are to merge - the next being The Cape and Peninsula technikons under the new Cape Peninsula University of Technology, in January 2004. Others will follow suit, forming clusters of higher learning, operating from different campuses.

According to Coppin, a shared and centrally managed IT system serving these clusters is the most sensible approach to solving both the current problem of disparate systems and to providing cost-effective, standardised services. "The restructure presents the ideal opportunity to streamline the financial, human resource and student management systems at these new universities," he said.

He believes these regional shared service centres could even operate as independent enterprises (commercial entities) owned by the universities, or outsourced to professional data outsourcing companies.

"The cost of IT infrastructure specifically was probably not a primary consideration when the decision was taken to merge some tertiary institutions, but the opportunity is there and should be exploited. One of the drivers in minister Asmal`s new five-point National Education Plan (NEP) calls for improved efficiency. This opportunity means the universities can pool their IT skills and deploy integrated systems that could even be shared among universities or, outsourced - something that has not happened before," said Coppin.

"Universities nowadays have to run like businesses and good corporate governance is therefore important. Shared resources will give them that by way of easier auditing, standardisation, comparison, inter-university transfer and overall data transparency," he said.

Oracle is a world leader in providing IT services for educational institutions. The company has a large installed base of systems for student management, human resources, financial and underlying database technology. Oracle South Africa has made inroads in the local education arena with the University of Johannesburg (formerly RAU). The company has also devised a blueprint for providing a sector-wide information solution for universities which it will launch at a industry summit in February 2004. Worldwide, Oracle cooperates with the World Bank in funding shared educational services centres in the developing world.