OIT at Penn State: Big Needs, Big Numbers

By Gordon E.J. Hoke, VP, eVisory Consulting

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Let’s talk big. Penn State University (www.psu.edu), one of America’s premier institutions of higher learning, is about as big as they come. From undergraduate to post-doctoral, Penn State serves almost 80,000 students on 24 campuses. About half of the “Nittany Lions” study at the centrally-located University Park campus. The university is as renowned for its academic distinctions as for its athletic accomplishments as the 11^th member of the Big Ten.

Penn State has all of the needs of any business, including human resources, accounts payable, and enterprise resource planning. In addition, it documents the fine details of all students from the first admission applications through the multiple and generous gifts of alumni. Thus the number of student-related records far exceeds 80,000 because it includes all applicants who do not attend the school and all 400,000 living alumni. Not surprisingly, documents – primarily paper – are the fabric of the institution. Document storage runs into the billions of pages.

In the mid-1990s, that became overwhelming. Increasingly, paper was stored off site. The time and cost of mailing or faxing documents to campuses across the state exasperated the staff and sapped funds from important projects.

In 1994, Penn State formed a University-wide Imaging Committee to evaluate the ability of document technologies to meet the University’s needs. The resulting report is available at www.psu.edu/computing/imaging.html. The committee noted several advantages that document imaging technologies could provide.

Simultaneous access to centralized records by departments across the state.
Elimination of the increasingly expensive redundancy of records.
Limiting the growth of labor costs and improving morale by diminishing tedium.
Making information easily available, independent of time or location.
Improved documentation of research and archiving of visual materials.

In late 1996, the Imaging Committee began to request proposals for an imaging system. “We did a detailed evaluation,” comments Edie Hertzog, associate director of Information Resources, “but it was hard to identify valid candidates. We had a bid conference and evaluated several proposals. When we finally chose Optical Image Technology [OIT] , it had a lot to do with features, functionality, and their good track record. Looking at their demo and what they offered, it was easy to see a vision that would bring us a long way,” she continues. “It has, and there are more good things to come in the next few years.”

OIT installed a prototype system at the Finance and Business offices. When that solution was successful, Penn State bought a global, enterprise, unlimited license from OIT. Soon after, the Accounting, Police, and Human Resources departments began installations, followed by Physical Plant and the Office of Administrative Systems. By the dawn of 2002, fully 13 departments used OIT software.

"Now we have imaging and COLD [computer report management] implemented across the university system, and we have plans for additional installations" relates Hertzog. "Admissions uses it, and the Registrar's office is starting to use it."

OIT offers modular, multi-faceted software to solve a wide variety of problems. Newer, Worldwide Web-based software that delivers documents and information anywhere and everywhere joins established technologies like imaging, COLD/ERM, workflow, forms processing, and character recognition. Users at each of the 24 Penn State locations electronically enter the system at University Park for the information they need. Some departments and campuses, including Hershey Medical Center, have their own OIT applications running locally as well.

Some departments resisted the change, and the Imaging Committee and OIT realized that the implementation process and training were as important as the software. “Although it is easy to use, the software has so much functionality that you can’t easily comprehend it,” explains Hertzog. “Once you have a vision, you have to sell it to users. You try to do something really good, but if people who use it don’t buy in, it is a constant sorrow. The places where this has been most successful are the places that have created the correct interface between images and their work.

"We've had a real range of adventures as we implemented these systems," she adds. "Each area has had its own problems and challenges, but we worked through them. For example, Accounting was having a hard time changing from microfilm until OIT added a custom button for indexing. We had to make imaging as easy as microfilm."

Recognizing their interdependence, Penn State and OIT created an active user group. There, OIT can hear the needs of the users, subsequently working to improve both the software’s functionality and its delivery. “It is an evolving product, and we are a part of the development process,” Hertzog notes.

A Few Examples from the Many

The Penn State solution is an interesting combination of diversity within unity. Although the overall software product is the same across the Penn State system, each department uses it in a somewhat different way. These different installations seriously exploit both the power and the flexibility of the product.

Accounting

When Accounting was paper-based, most of the several million records were stored away from the office site. Both retrieval and re-filing were labor intensive.

Operators who now scan between 3-5,000 pages per day (in addition to credit card receipts and statements) replaced the old retrieval process in 1997. Now the most recent records reside in a RAID (magnetic storage) box for near instant retrieval. As records age, they migrate to an optical disk jukebox where retrievals may take a few seconds. Nearly all of Accounting’s records are now digital, and the rest will follow suit shortly.

Workers with security clearance view the images (primarily Accounts Payable documents) using a browser on the Worldwide Web. “The system delivers records that are important to Accounting as well as other areas of the University,” explains Todd Cardamone, Network Analyst in the Controller’s Office. “That wasn’t possible before. The web-based part of the system could even allow outside vendors to have access to particular documents if need be.” Although no return on investment was calculated, Cardamone sees the economic benefit. “With respect to document handling, we’re doing more work, faster, and with less staff,” he smiles. Asked about misgivings, he shares, “Five years ago, OIT hardly had a customer support department. It has improved a thousand-fold, and we are happy. Now they are very responsive; they worked hard at improving in the areas of service and support and succeeded.”

Accounting is one of the largest departments within the Corporate Controller’s Office, which overseas the financial area and was the initial point of installation for OIT products at Penn State University. The office also includes Payroll, Risk Management, Financial Reporting, and Research Accounting. The latter monitors the grants and expenditures related to all of the academic research at Penn State.

Law Enforcement

For the University Police Department, the issue is not the overload of paper as much as accessibility and “share-ability” of records. Bruce Kline, a 30-year veteran of the Penn State Police and Assistant Director for Administrative Systems, oversees the documentation of about 3300 cases per year. “Most take from three to 10 pages, but in 1997 we had a shooting that generated thousands of pages.”

The bigger challenge is sharing information regionally. University Police interact with six different city police departments, the Borough of State College that administers two townships, and two other townships with their own P.D.s. Those offices and the regional 911 center exchange information on a regional intranet. The University Police staff of 65 views any of the departments’ 2.5 million pages almost instantly. Although not yet implemented, they have the potential to fully share their files with any agency they choose via conventional browsers.

Both the storage and the communications run on OIT software modules, and Kline is enthusiastic about how the system improves officers’ efficiency while making it harder for criminals to exploit the variety of jurisdictions.

However, Kline is far from complacent. His staff recently installed surveillance cameras, so he expects to store video files as documents. Similarly he wants to store audio files of depositions, interviews, and officers’ notes – even from the field.

Undergraduate Admissions

The Undergraduate Admissions Office was ripe for remote access because of its structure. The Office, located at University Park, processes applications for admission to all undergraduate programs at 20 campuses. Web access to student applications and supporting documents replaces a tremendous amount of manual filing, shuffling, and a flurry of faxes and phone calls.

Now, remote workers simply log in and call up any records they need to see.

Penn State receives about 50,000 undergraduate applications a year. This is complicated by the fact that

It is a seasonal load, with most arriving in the fall, and
Supporting documents arrive independently and sporadically and need to be associated with particular applications.

The solution is that each paper application receives its own bar code when it arrives. When supporting documents arrive, the mainframe database finds the applicant by name, social security number, or other identifiers, assigning the application’s barcode to the new arrivals.

The 2001-2002 admissions year was the first time ever that almost half of the applications arrived over the Web. Those applications go to the mainframe system directly. They become entries in computer reports that are available to browsers with no significant difference from the scanned paper applications. Because the mainframe is fully integrated with the OIT system, changes made in the database automatically appear in the document system.

Portals on the Horizon

Hertzog points to that easy integration of OIT software with existing platforms, systems and databases as one reason for the multiple successes at the university. She expects that quality to carry the partnership well into the future. For example, Penn State is building its own portal system, and they have asked OIT to integrate the document technologies with the portal application.

Amongst the dozens of departments, the varieties of solutions are many. Yet they all work together for the benefit of higher education in Pennsylvania.

For more information on Penn State’s imaging efforts and current projects, please visit the Electronic Document Management System web site at http://ais.its.psu.edu/document_imaging/index.html

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Gordon E.J. Hoke is a Contributing Editor to Transform Magazine and a consultant in document and content technologies. In the latter role, he helps clients analyze and solve their paper, information, and business process problems. Hoke can be reached at gordon.hoke@evisoryconsulting.com and (507) 534-2293.

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