Fulcrum Solution for Higher Education gets nominated for  “UCISA Award for Excellence 2009”

April 7, 2010: UCISA Award for Excellence 2009 was conducted on Jan 2010 in UK. The aim of the UCISA Award for Excellence is to recognize and highlight levels of excellence and best practice that currently exist and are demonstrated by UCISA members within the UK higher and further education sectors. The Award for Excellence may be in an area listed below, or indeed a significant integration of a number of these headings:

* Innovation

* Systems integration

* Leadership

* Self-service implementation

* Business management improvements

* Returns on investment

* Managed learning environments

* Integration of new technologies into learning and teaching

* Collaboration

The solution Fulcrum developed called STEP-C was collaboration between two quite different Universities which run completely different applications. The challenge was to implement two completely different Enterprise Services Buses in the Universities and implement connectors to 4 very different types of applications and then to demonstrate that a SINGLE reporting program could retrieve data from the two Universities WITHOUT changes to the logic of the report.

Traditionally, Universities have chosen application systems from a variety of suppliers to support their administrative and learning processes. IT departments then had to develop a complex web of interfaces between systems. Typically, the Student Record system alone might have more that 10 sets of interfaces making it expensive and time-consuming to implement, maintain and upgrade.

To meet the demands for more lean and agile systems the sector needs a technology shift towards ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ (SOA) which basically implements a ‘backbone’ (an ‘Enterprise Service Bus’- ESB) to which any application makes a single connection. Information can then be passed between any two University applications or to an application residing on the Internet via the ESB. New systems can be connected or disconnected easily from the backbone.

The STEP-C project was funded by HEFCE/JISC in 2009 as part of the Flexible Services Delivery program to show how SOA solutions could be implemented in ANY University by demonstrating how to solve the ‘generic’ rather than specific problems.

The project:

1.  demonstrated a complex solution in two quite different Universities which run quite different application systems;

2.  Implemented 2 different ESBs from different vendors (IBM and Microsoft) at the two Institutions;

3.  Choose FOUR quite different types of applications at each University to connect to the ESB – some systems were already Web-Service enabled (or so their vendors claimed!), some were connected via Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and some had never been designed to be connected to an ESB.

To make the situation even more challenging, the project sought to test whether a single report could retrieve the same basic information from either University system WITHOUT any programming changes – i.e. that it should be ‘blind’ to the fact that the two Universities were running completely different application systems and different Enterprise Service Buses!

Southampton Solent and De Montfort Universities collaborated to define the set of requirements and then actively managed a team of systems integrators, Fulcrum. The University staff extracted representative data from live application systems and then ‘spoofed’/’anonymised’ the personal information so that development teams in India and the United States could create testable solutions. The resulting solutions were then implemented on servers within each University within a TEST environment but using copies of real data to demonstrate that the solutions worked.

The project insisted that ALL project documentation, ideas and intellectual property were to be transferred from the systems integrator to the HE sector – so that all lessons could be made available to every UK University. Thus, the key deliverable of the project is NOT the demonstration that an SOA-based solution can be constructed quickly – but that all of the key decisions and ways of designing and implementing the solution are being made available (in a ‘Cook Book’ style) to every UK University.

Why is this project “Excellent”?

“From the very first meeting to the final sign-off of a complex development project, Fulcrum rarely put a foot wrong. They were total professional in all of their dealings with all of my staff and colleagues. It was clear from very early in the project design stages that this project was going to be delivered on time, in full and within specification. It’s amazing to have a vendor who can inspire and then deliver such excellent results!” says Paul Hopkins, Director – ISAS – De Montfort University.

This project demonstrates excellence in the areas of:-

Innovation: This is a truly innovative project to demonstrate how to solve the generic problems of SOA in TWO quite different University environments – and to complete the project in a remarkable short period of time (three months).

Systems Integration: This project demonstrated how to link together 4 applications at De Montfort (Student Records, Finance, VLE and GoogleMail) via an Enterprise Service Bus. And similarly at Solent(Student Records, Library, VLE). Then it demonstrated running the same reporting query across each of the Institutions. This is a remarkable feat of systems integration – especially with the complete development was executed within 3 months.

Return on Investment: The project was funded with £90k of HEFCE/JISC funds plus major amounts of De Montfort and Solent staff time and resources. It has clearly delivered everything which was envisaged at the beginning of the project and has created for the entire sector a set of intellectual property which can be used to construct future solutions for ANY University.

Collaboration: This project was actively managed by two very different Universities a long way distant from each other. The project team also included a systems integrator who was very new to the sector and had architects and developers based in India, the US and also the UK. At the two Universities, the project teams required skill sets from the technical areas and many different application systems areas. Hence, this project represented a truly complex set of collaborations – to create a complex solution in a few months.

This project therefore demonstrates an exceptionally high Return on Investment to the entire sector by opening up a set of technological solutions all institutions to ; it demonstrates excellence both with the technical complexity of what was achieved but also in the project management of a truly complex, multi-institutional set of teams within a remarkably short project timescale. It also clearly demonstrates the transference of Best Practice by publishing both the Intellectual Property and the ‘Cook Book’ explanations of what other Institutions should do to get started in this field.

A further major benefit of this project is that the sector can now show potential vendors what can be achieved on a very small budget and within a narrow window of time. This could become a truly powerful negotiating tool with potential vendors – and details of the project financial, planning and project reports/methodologies will be available to any UK University which requests them.

Editor Notes

About Fulcrum:

Fulcrum is a Global Business and IT consulting firm with offices in NJ, SFO, Reading UK and delivery centers in Mumbai & Pune India. Fulcrum is focused on solving business challenges of medium to large scale organization by blending cutting edge technologies with in-house domain expertise and collaborating with a strong network of functional industry experts. Core expertise lies in Higher Education, Insurance, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Retail, Life Sciences and Media. Solutions expertise across a gamut of practices including: Custom Framework Development (Java, .NET, Opensource), Business Intelligence & DW, Platform Integration/Migration/Upgrades, Managed Services (NOC, 24/7/365 Support), Testing Services and Niche expertise in Collaboration Technologies (IBM Websphere Portal, MOSS, JBOSS, LifeRay). For more information visit www.fulcrumww.com