November 21, 2001

MEMORANDUM

TO: Mr. Michael Curtin

Director, Office of Planning and Budget

FROM: Dale B. Billingsley

Office of the University Provost

On Friday Dr. Garrison approved the strategy and specific recommendations for proceeding with the adjustments to the ORION budget for the remainder of this year. This strategy includes specific implementation cuts as well as transfers of certain expenses to other accounts more appropriately charged. (These transfers are in addition to those already in the advisory committee budget proposal.) At Dr. Garrison’s instruction, we seek your guidance in making the arrangements necessary for the transfers of charges to other accounts, as noted below.

1. Implementation elements to be reinstated

The following items (totaling $196,400, and numbered per the “ORION Budget and Expenses by Project,” 11/07/01) were originally proposed as cuts by the advisory committee. The Steering Committee, however, notes that failing to complete these tasks risks the successful completion of the overall project as well as other university priorities. These items will therefore be continued in the budgeted implementation for this year:

#48 e-Provisioning $100,000

Security and accounts management software necessary for using the system via the web platform

#72 Mass Changes for Financial Aid $20,000

SQR programming for nightly updates to the Financial Aid records (to replace an existing mass change protocol) in order to assure expeditious handling of competitive scholarship awards

#74 Stress Testing $50,000

Subcontracting for machine-driven system tests to assure that the servers can handle the workload when the system is available to the university community.

#11 Reduce Financial Consulting Budget $26,400

The Financials implementation team holds that the lack of this consultant will critically impair the implementation and risk its success.

2. Transfer of charges to other budgets

To fund continuations listed in point 1, the executive sponsors propose that the following charges (totaling $139,827) against the project should be transferred to these other units or accounts where the expenses are more properly borne:

Faculty Personnel Database prototyping $ 6,600

These charges arose from a failure to accommodate information necessary for accreditation review in the original prototyping of the HR system (transfer to the Office of the University Provost)

Citrix server 66,062

Hardware necessary to connect users and university departments in off-campus hospital and office sites in the hospital complex (transfer to the Office of the Vice President for Health Affairs)

Facilities upgrades for Miller IT Center 30,700

Equipment and network connections to create work space in the former IT library, and disability access services for a new permanent employee (transfer to the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology or a renovation account)

KVYU interface programming 36,465

(Transfer to the Delphi Center)

At the provost’s instruction, we seek your direction concerning the transfer of the following charges (totaling $79,000):

Faculty/Staff directory $ 9,000

Resource 25 backfill $70,000

Outside consultants hired to replace an IT technical staff member who was transferred to complete work necessary for the Resource 25/PeopleSoft interface.

If all of these adjustments are successful, a $22,000 credit against the cut will be available to provide additional support for training. The project teams will continue to seek other budget transfers in order to equalize charges for changes requested by users. Dr. Garrison and Dr. Moore also tentatively agreed that any additional unbudgeted changes requested for any purpose must be accompanied by a proposed funding source other than the ORION account.

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Dr. Carol Garrison, Provost

ORION Steering Committee

ORION Advisory Committee