INSTITUTION:
Lehigh University
PROJECT TITLE:
SAFAHRIS: Integrated Institutional Information Systems
PRIMARY CONTACT:
Arnold Hirshon,
Vice Provost for Information Resources
Lehigh University
8A Packer Avenue
Bethlehem PA 18015-3170
voice: 610/758-3025
fax: 610/758-3004
ATTENDING THE JULY MEETING:
Roy Gruver,
Group Leader for Technology Management Services and SAFAHRIS Project Manager
(rag3@lehigh.edu)
Randy Wambold,
Team Leader for Enterprise Information
(rew0@lehigh.edu)
ALSO ON THE PROJECT TEAM (but not attending July meeting):
Arnold Hirshon,
Vice Provost for Information Resources
(arh5@lehigh.edu)
Frank Benginia,
Associate Registrar and SAFAHRIS Team Leader for Student Services
(fab0@lehigh.edu)
BRIEF PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The SAFAHRIS Project is intended to establish an entirely newinstitution-wide networked information infrastructure based uponredesigned non-teaching processes and recreated student, advancement, financial and human resource information systems. The primary motivation for SAFAHRIS is to dramatically improve our operating practices, our client services, and the use of enterprise information as a strategic institutional resource to improve our decisions and provide new and enhanced services.
We expect our SAFAHRIS initiative to encompass many if not all of the key resource dimensions enumerated in the IWIS white paper:
We will be establishing for the first time, an institution- wide technology platform designed to facilitate the strategic and tactical use of enterprise information. And we will employ that platform to deliver a new set of “administrative information systems.”
We believe that we will have to be extremely creative in applying our financial and human resources to this effort given the competing needs of the institution.
Organizationally, we expect the redesign of non-teaching processes willcreate opportunities for new internal alliances which didn’t exist before and the opportunity to create an entirely new group of information, rather than process, workers.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this project will be the ability of the institution to create and sustain policies and practices which will result in better information,more accessible information, and simpler processes. We expect this to be a major challenge, perhaps the most difficult challenge of our initiative.
SAFAHRIS is a work in progress, not a plan on a drawing board. It will challenge us in many ways and it will reward us as well. While this is a real life experience for us at Lehigh, it can be considered as an open lab experiment for others to view and even participate in. Lehigh would welcome others to be involved in this experience either in an advisory or in a more direct, participative role. In addition, we expect that certainaspects of SAFAHRIS will provide more focused learning opportunities, both for Lehigh and others.