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discussed above, the varied requirements of the individual schools and their
associated legacy systems presented an equally acute challenge.
All of the schools had different admission applications. They used Contact Manager, home-
grown Access databases, CCC, and other applications. So there were lots of different
processes and systems that we had to plan for. - SIS Trainer
The IPSI project encountered a similar diversity of voices to the customization
and implementation of the information sharing platform. In addition to the require-
ments embodied in BSI's Enforce 3 system, each of the anchor partners came to
the project with distinct processes and legacy platforms that needed to be accom-
modated on the new system. The participation of ancillary agencies targeted for
migration to the platform over the subsequent years expanded the range of consider-
ation dramatically. As the project progressed, several new sources of requirements
input were indentified, including the State Attorney General, the State Police, fed-
eral law enforcement entities (e.g., the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation), and
national public safety information platforms (e.g., the National Data Exchange
[N-DEx]). Balancing all of these inputs was a consistent challenge for the IPSI
effort.
5.11 Defining Interactions
As the diversity of inputs outlined above suggests, capturing interactions between
the vendor platform and other disparate systems was a recurring theme in both
the University SIS and IPSI project. In the University SIS case, the project team
encountered multiple issues because of inappropriate mapping to legacy applica-
tions. Even within the PeopleSoft suite (i.e., between SIS and the existing Financial
and Human Capital Management modules), the project team struggled to define
appropriate interfaces and maintenance processes:
Actually PeopleSoft delivers the software intending you to run in a combined, shared envi-
ronment of those systems. We decided to keep them separate here and then build the
interface program between them because one of the main costs of these PeopleSoft sys-
tems is the maintenance. It's very difficult to get the two different business cycles on the
same schedule to do maintenance. Now might actually be a good time in Human Capital
management to be doing maintenance but it's a terrible time in the Student system with
classes starting. The middle of the summer might be good for the Student system, but for
Human Capital Management, that is when they enter all the performance reviews for people,
so it's a bad time for them. - SIS Technical Lead
On the IPSI effort, the project team anticipated significant difficulty in converting
the disparate CAD/RMS systems used by various partner agencies onto the infor-
mation sharing platform. As the proposed number of agencies to be supported by
the Enforce3 platform grew, so did the challenges in defining interactions between
the various legacy systems. As the Project Manager observed:
They'll be some coding issues. In one agency for example, you may have hair color: black,
brown, red, yellow (1, 2, 3, 4). Well in my agency, we've got five colors. It's yellow, black,
green, brown, blue or the numbers are different. You're sending me numbers. You can't
send me numbers. I have to know what the color is. How are we going to work this out?
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