League Reaffirmation - Johnson County Community College

Information Services
JCCC’s Information Services branch and the functional areas
associated with the college’s enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system, Banner, began working in January 2005 on migrating
from Sun hardware and operating system to a more costeffective
and efficient hardware and software solution. At the
same time, the network was reconfigured to place ERP traffic
into a separate network segment as part of an ongoing effort to
secure database traffic.
This monumental undertaking required institutional strategic,
budget and technical planning over the course of two years.
The design was implemented and tested in the test environments
over a two­month period. It was then implemented and has
resulted in a number of processing efficiencies for the business
areas. The amount of time saved in these processes totaled over
72 hours.
Furthermore, there was an immediate $60,000 savings in
hardware and software costs for the existing environments and
a projected savings of at least $450,000 as the branch builds
its disaster recovery environments. The upgrade, which affected
more than 40,000 people, resulted in only six help desk calls
on the first business day it went live.
As JCCC has continued to increase the use of technology, the
college has seen the demand for additional servers increase.
Ordering, receiving and deploying a physical server can take
several weeks and costs an average of $5,000 per server. In
addition, the servers use electricity, produce heat, and require
maintenance and eventually disposal. Over the past two years
the college has implemented server virtualization software that
has reduced the ordering, receiving and deployment time from
weeks to less than an hour. In addition, the cost of a virtual
server is less than $1,000. Across the college, the virtualization
of servers has produced an annual energy savings of
approximately $56,350. Furthermore, the college has saved
approximately $467,705 on the 115 physical servers that
would have been bought without server virtualization.
Other initiatives from
Information Services
include:
• The use of control objectives for
information and related technology
(COBIT) to conduct self­audits for
technology department processes.
This proactive approach, which is
based on technology audit guidelines,
produces processes that are
streamlined and audit­ready.
• Document imaging across various
departments, ranging from student
services to financial services and the
president’s office, was implemented.
Approximately 2,100,000 documents
were migrated from a legacy system to
an electronic format that is searchable,
available and linked to the enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system.
The initiative eliminated rooms of
filing cabinets, giving needed space
back to college.
• An integrated test plan process
transitioned large technology project
testing from ad hoc/one­off test plans
to a well­orchestrated, reliable test
method. This process shaved weeks
off of project testing and improved
results.
• An online access request process has
been an innovation from an efficiency
perspective. The process moved IS’
system account creation time from
an approximate two­week turnaround
time for access requests to a two days
or fewer turnaround time.
“Johnson County Community College has one of the most systematic and strategic approaches
to supporting its institutional mission through technology that we have seen. It focuses on student
service, operational efficiency and collaboration inside and outside its walls. JCCC has been a
leader in responding to the constantly evolving constituent needs, and its model has been copied
by other institutions. JCCC’s rigorous and thorough approach toward technology implementation,
which incorporates significant project review and planning, is unusually well­considered.
JCCC has participated in a number of our software development beta programs and freely offers
implementation advice to other clients. We are proud to support JCCC and to call them our partner.”
– Brian Madocks, CEO, Sungard Higher Education
37