Information Technology Strategic Planning

Projects

Project Title:

Operational Data Store (ODS) 8

Project Advocate:

Mariette Araya

Project Manager:

Mariette Araya

Project Overview:

This project is prerequisite for the upgrade to Banner 8 which is planned for July 2009, as the current version of ODS will not function with Banner 8.  The project will upgrade ODS (currently at version 3.1.0) to ODS 8.0.  The reason for such a dramatic shift in version number is due to the fact that Sungard never released version 4 through 7 (Sungard only wished to line up all version numbers of their core products so that “Banner 8” would be in line with “ODS 8”).

Key Stakeholders:

All Student Affairs Offices
Institutional Research
School of Engineering

Benefits:

The benefits offered by ODS 8, other than compatibility with Banner 8 are minimal.    Minor improvements in speed have been made, a few additional data elements are available, and the character set is changed a UTF format to allow for potential international data.

Project Deliverables:

Initiative(s) Supported:

Related Projects:

Milestones:

ODS 8.0 Test/Development Environment (DODS): 9/29/2008~3/1/2009

ODS 8.0 Production Environment (PODS): 12/29/2008~7/1/2009

Costs & Funding (Capital & Operational):

N/A (no new hardware/software is to be purchased)

Project Team:

FernandoReynoso (Project Manager and technical lead)
Stan Stavitsky (UNIX and DBA work)
Eric Twiss and/or Sheryl Stang (potentially additional UNIX support)

Issues/Risks:

This will be the first ODS upgrade to actually take place. Unexpected problems may need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Limited time is available (both for John and Stan) to fully focus on this project as other significant duties must also be handled. Although the amount of time required to complete this project can be small if taken care of in a continuous block of time, interruptions of the installation process (for other, more serious production problems) can greatly increase the amount of time required to complete simple tasks within this project.

Consumers of data from ODS (currently IT and the School of Engineering) must be prepared for the UTF character-set change. Their systems must be able to adjust accordingly.

A flawed or late implementation can cause the Banner 8.0 schedule to become delayed.


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