This month’s theme of “change” truly hits home for the Applications Development team as change is a constant driver for the activities undertaken by the team. The changes they tackle can come in many forms…
Customer driven change – We work in close collaboration with our Carleton customers to build/implement/adapt solutions that meet their ever changing business needs.
Sometimes this requires that we be the chief architects and developers of a new solution, and other times we need to be the integrator of 3rd party vendor solutions into our technology ecosystem. These changes come in all shapes and sizes, some requiring that a team of AD resources be brought together for a period of time while smaller change initiatives are usually handled by a single resource. Some of these changes are mandated by the government agencies that the University must interact and comply with on a regular basis (e.g. MTCU, CRA, etc.). In these cases Applications Development must respond (often very quickly) in order to meet the changing regulatory compliance needs of these agencies.
Vendor changes – Applications Development is at the forefront of ensuring that our systems stay current with the latest advances made by our large technology partners. We are currently managing an upgrade to the latest release of our core Oracle database platform, with the move from Oracle 10g to 11g slated for the end of November.
This time last year we were in the process of upgrading to Release 8 of our Banner administrative systems. In 2011/2012 we are looking at a complete technology overhaul for the Banner applications which will have a profound impact on tools used by the Applications Development team on a day to day basis. Stay tuned for further details on this major change initiative.