Mosaic Blog

As one of the co-directors of the Student Administration part of the Mosaic project, I would like to respond to Paul Cervantes’ Op-Ed piece in the Daily Wildcat published on 4/23/2009, ‘The Problem with WebReg.’ Paul’s article makes a number of good points that I’d like to remark on.

UA Campus Community,

We’re no longer in a deciding mode—we’ve made a decision…Last fall we issued an RFP for the Mosaic Project hosting solutions.  We tailored the RFP in such a way as to solicit responses for hardware alone, data center co-location facilities alone, or a combination of the two.  We received a number of viable responses to the RFP and after painstaking analysis and discussion awarded the hardware purchasing component to Dell.  At that time we did not award this particular RFP to any of the respondents for the data center co-location and/or environment management RFP.

We realize that it has taken a while for this decision to be made. This is in part due to the fact that we had the time.  However we now have production go-live dates on the horizon, so now is the time to commit to a direction so that equipment can be purchased and prepared for deployment.

Locations, organizations, people...these sorts of very tangible things have associated attributes that show up a lot in administrative systems--attributes like names, addresses, and so forth. In fact they show up so much in so many different systems that collectively are often referred to as 'common data.' These attributes, and the entities they describe, are so real in our physical world that one might be surprised to learn what a problem they pose for folks in the information system business. But they do. And it’s a big problem too...

...we salute you. I haven't written in a long time; too long. It turns out timing is everything here. If I don't write just when the mood strikes and don't keep things short enough, I get distracted, or have to go to one of many meetings, or I just get too tired. I can't imagine I'm unique in this way.

In case you don't already know, we have selected Hobsons EMT as our partner for student recruiting. They are offering us a hosted solution, so they will handle all of the software and hardware. It was a good process and the competition was strong. In the end the team felt Hobsons would help us move forward in the directions we want to go.

The implementation is being led by Nikolas Hodge, a longtime recruiter and generally high-energy young woman whose enthusiasm is contagious. She and her team have telephone calls every week with Hobsons to discuss UA's requirements, and they expect we will be up and running this very May!

UA Campus Community,

Sorry I haven’t posted earlier, but there’s been a lot of progress and at the same time one of the key questions remains open.

In my previous post I mentioned two initiatives that we were involved in, the pilot PeopleSoft deployment in partnership with ASU and an RFP for hardware and co-location facilities, I would like to share the available results with you.