Pennsylvania State University: Imaging at Penn State: One Solution, Multiple Variations

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Pennsylvania State University: Imaging at Penn State: One Solution, Multiple Variations

9/26/2002

By Gordon Hoke

Penn State University is a big school, as big as they come. From undergraduate to post-doctoral programs, the university serves almost 80,000 students on 24 campuses. As such, it has all the needs of any business, and has human resources, accounts payable, and enterprise resource planning systems. In addition, it documents the administrative path of all its students, from first admission through alumni gift-giving.

Thus the number of student-related records far exceeds 80,000 as it includes applicants who do not ultimately attend the school as well as all 400,000 living alumni. Not surprisingly, documents—primarily paper—are the fabric of the institution. Document storage runs into the billions of pages.

In the mid-1990s, that became overwhelming. Increasingly, paper was stored off site. The time and cost of mailing or faxing documents to campuses across the state exasperated the staff and sapped funds from important projects. In 1994, Penn State formed a university-wide Imaging Committee to evaluate the ability of document technologies to meet its needs. The resulting report, available at www.psu.edu/

computing/imaging.html, noted several advantages that document imaging technologies could provide, including simultaneous access to centralized records; elimination of expensive recordkeeping redundancies; limiting labor costs; and improved documentation of research and archiving of visual materials.

In late 1996, the Committee began to request proposals for an imaging system, and ultimately chose a system from Optical Imaging Technology (OIT). “It had a lot to do with features, functionality, and their good track record,” said Edie Hertzog, associate director of Penn State Information Resources. “Looking at their demo and what they offered, it was easy to see a vision that would bring us a long way.”

OIT installed a prototype system at the Finance and Business offices. When that solution proved successful, Penn State bought an unlimited enterprise license from OIT. Soon after, the accounting, police, and human resources departments began to install the system, followed by physical plant and the office of administrative systems. By early 2002, 13 departments used OIT software. “Now we have imaging and COLD [Computer Output to Laser Disk] implemented across the university system, and we have plans for additional installations,” said Hertzog.

As with most campus-wide conversions, some departments resisted the change. The Imaging Committee and OIT realized that the implementation process and training were as important as the software itself. “Although it is easy to use, the software has so much functionality that you can’t easily comprehend it,” said Hertzog. “Once you have a vision, you have to sell it to users. You try to do something really good, but if people who use it don’t buy in, it is a constant sorrow. The places where this has been most successful are the places that have created the correct interface between images and their work.

Recognizing their interdependence, Penn State and OIT created an active user group. Within the user group, OIT can hear the needs of the users, and subsequently work to improve both the software’s functionality and its delivery. “It is an evolving product, and we are a part of the development process,” Hertzog notes.