Evolving and Implanting Web-based E-Government Systems in Universities
This work provides a practical solution for university administrators and stakeholders to enhance efficiency and service delivery, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems and processes.
The paper addresses the increased administrative demands and need for better information services in universities due to the Bologna Process, by evolving IT infrastructure at Braunschweig University of Technology through integrating legacy systems, customizing software, and developing new modules to support business processes and e-government services.
The Bologna Process has triggered a major restructuring of the current university diploma into a bachelor/master system. As one effect, the administration effort for the new system has increased dramatically. As a second effect, students need and demand a much better information policy, given the new possibilities of the internet. Both to increase efficiency of the university's administration and to provide students as well as lecturers with modern e government services, it is inevitable to evolve the current IT-infrastructure of a university into a modern web-based landscape of systems that support business processes on campus. In this paper, we describe the approach taken at the Braunschweig University of Technology to evolve the existing landscape of legacy systems by adding bridges between previously unrelated parts, adding and customizing unused modules of existing software to bring information and services online and to develop new software, where old modules could not serve the necessary purposes. Most of all, both implementation of the results in university's business processes and the resulting quick feedback and wishes for feature enhancement are seen as part of the software development processes and discussed in this paper.