Director's Message, by Jennifer Gehrt

The Financial Information System is live! Several milestones have recently been met for implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite at K-State: The high availability hardware has been installed, the project team has completed the initial set-up of production, and we are now ready to maintain live data with daily updates from HRIS. In addition, the Budget Office is utilizing the new accounting structure for the preparation of the FY 2006 university budget. The FIS team is putting the finishing touches on interfaces to and from other systems, reports, balancing methodology development, and readying the system for final testing. There is still much to be done, but significant progress is being made every day!

Hands-on end user training will start in May and continue beyond implementation. Project team members and end users should realize this FIS implementation is the beginning of what is to come, not an ending to the project. A good example is the continuing evolvement of reports for end users after initial implementation. I am reminded of a quote by John Galsworthy, British Novelist: “Beginnings are always messy.” Although the project team is making every effort to thoroughly test all processes, there is always a possibility that something might not quite work as expected. We have a very capable functional and technical staff that will be able to resolve issues that are encountered.

We are making progress with the student system part of the Oracle E-Business Suite as well. Oracle provided important functionality earlier this year that will allow us to process admittance of students within our business requirements. Technical members who normally work on the legacy systems have started working on reports, while team leads are working with Oracle to provide advice and feedback on the next software release. It is important for us to remain involved in the design and development of what we plan on implementing at K-State. We are in the process of determining exactly how K-State will conduct business using this new student system. The team is expending considerable effort in reviewing the old way, devising the new way, then planning to manage the impact on people. As William Bridges states in his book, Managing Transitions, “…the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home.” That is certainly easier said than done!