The Information Systems Group has developed many applications that provide significant benefit to the College of Engineering (COE) and The Pennsylvania State University (PSU).

Over the years, these applications have drawn the attention of other business and academic units throughout the University. Design and development resources within the COE and the disparate requirements of other units made it impractical to develop these resources for wide adoption throughout the university. The IS group would like other units to benefit from the functionality that these applications provide. To make this desire a reality we have developed a model that will allow this to happen.

Each application or resource listed below represents a service, or group of services, developed for the COE. It seems realistic to extend this service model to other units. This service model will allow other units to benefit from the design, development and management expertise of the COE while minimizing their own staffing and support requirements.

Each of these applications can be configured and deployed to provide service to many organizations while maintaining a separation among organizations. Another way to refer to this separation is "data security". This is analogous to the systems deployed by various central administrative offices with one very big difference. Unlike central services, where the customer focus is central administrative offices, the customer base of these services will be the academic units. In other words, these systems will be configured and designed to suite the requirements of end users. This represents a bottom-up customer focus rather than the top-down focus that exists in so many existing systems.

For units that desire greater in-house functionality to service their faculty, students and staff, this model represents a cost effective method for providing additional services without increasing staff.

These services cannot be offered free of cost. There is a cost for all system development regardless of who does it. Therefore, units that wish to deploy the functionality of these systems within their organization must contribute to the development and maintenance of these systems. The cost of development, when shared among units, will be significantly less than developing and maintaining these same systems alone.

The benefits to utilizing the services of the Information Sytems are many. Staff of the IS group have significant experience in database design, client-server applications development, web application development, web site management, data warehouse design, data warehouse management, network security, data security and expert knowledge of central administrative systems and procedures.