Friday, March 30, 2001
9:00 am

The UNC Shared Services Alliance Advisory Board met in Board Room A of the General Administration Building in Chapel Hill, on Friday, March 30, 2001 at 9:00 a.m. The Chairperson called the meeting to order.

The following were in attendance.

A motion was made and approved to accept the minutes of the March 2nd meeting with minor corrections.

e-Procurement Update
The Director of Collaborative Procurement provided the Board with an update related to the activities surrounding e-Procurement. There were approximately seven rollout meetings across the State for e-Procurement spanning from Asheville to Greenville in about a week and a half timeframe. The basic functionality of the system was discussed. Purchasing people from many of the schools were in attendance at these meeting. We have since then been having discussion with their project team about how the commodity codes can be used. Those commodity codes are used in your fixed assets systems, your purchase order systems, and used to track internal reporting. There has been some talk about going to the 10-digit NIGP code, which is what the DOT is using with their SAP system. We talked them into doing a five digit code the way we are currently doing it, then they can add on the identifiers at the end of they choose to do so. The e-procurement project is Accenture, Ariba, Epylon, who have teamed with ITS, the Controller's Office and Purchase and Contracts to put this together. Their plan is to have 23 contracts for the State in the new e-Procurement catalog by July. The next question was if we are not part of NCAS (North Carolina Accounting System) which none of us are, how do we integrate into this or do we? They are cutting the purchasing model of NCAS off in July and the e-Procurement system will take its place. There are 155 consultants working on this project. This is actually a revenue project so there is no money being outlaid by the State to bring it on-line. There is a single ITS employee in charge of this. The Procurement Office of General Administration is trying to stay in close contact to determine how it affects us. Currently what they would like for us to do is run some kind of file dumping mechanism and use the e-Procurement system and feed that information back into our system. The alternative to them was to get one campus fully integrated. We are trying to identify an initial campus that has a Purchasing Officer, a Systems Officer, a CFO and CIO that are willing to back this and do the full integration. Once we get that completed, what they would like for us to do is roll that out to other campuses. The project is paying for the vendors to put their catalogues on line. We have made a lot of progress over the last month and have quite a ways to go, but I think the functionality is the same as what the purchasing officers have now with SCT purchasing module. If you try to do a non-integrated process you are loosing the funds checking, encumbering and things of that nature. We do not want to loose any of the functionality. Members of both the Alliance and Procurement staff have been on several calls with the project team to try to explain to them how we function and how we work. We do not want to loose functionality we have day-to-day now.

This is not just an Alliance issue. It is a total system issue. The primary point of contact is for this is the Director of Collaborative Procurement.

This system will recognize the purchasing card. They are all state contract items that are going on first, so if you buying some off contact and would like to use the card, then it would be appropriate way to use the card. The audit at the end is one thing that they are concerned about.

There will be 150 contacts by February. They are only dealing with goods and commodities, and are not dealing with services, construction or any of that.

A question was raised about leasing. ITS is working out the leasing plan currently, it will be attached to the current 204 microcomputer contract. The RFP that was on the street is gone. Currently handling this on manufacturer-by-manufacturer basis, lease and refresh or buy.

The Procurement offices have moved to Meredith Drive.

A pricing document for PLUS ADS and PLUS Web for Alumni was distributed to the Board for discussion as a possible product to assist in addressing the baseline service items identified under Alumni Services. Part of the proposal included using existing funds from the SCT services contract to help with some enhancements. The 'Make a Donation' service may be one possibility to consider using the SCT services contract to assist with. NCSA has the Web for ADS installed and Eddy is extremely knowledgeable in Payment Gateway. This enhancement could then be shared with the other institutions.

The question was posed if the seven focus growth institutions would be required to use their funding or was this straight Alliance funding. The Interim Executive Director was under the impress after discussion with the VP of Information Resources that this was straight Alliance funding. The seven campuses could use their funds for additional training or enhancements to the product.

There was consensus that this had possibility. It was noted there needs to be an external database such as MS Access and a JDBC driver. The campuses should have the database, but more information will need to be acquired concerning the cost of the JDBC driver component.

It was also noted that when the Alumni/Development personnel looked at Web for Alumni it was not presented well and then they saw the Banner presentation, which was, must better. What we want to do is to sell this properly. Web for Alumni must be shown in the best way possible and allow them to tell us what enhancement they want, and make it very clear this is a stopgap. If we can do those three things, it will probably be okay.

Everybody but Elizabeth City already has the ADS product. NCCU has the product but must pay back maintenance to receive the current version. There are eight campuses that do not currently have the Web for Alumni.

The advisory workgroup needs to buy into the purchase of this solution. The Interim Executive Director will set up an open meeting to bring the Alumni/Development workgroup to General Administration to discuss proposal and have a more informative presentation of the product by SCT. The whole intent is to try to meet the baseline requirements and provide some limited enhancements.

There was a motion made and seconded to approve the following amounts contingent upon buy in from the Alumni/Development workgroup. If acceptance is obtained, the Board can vote electronically.

By-Laws

At the March 2nd Board meeting a By-Laws Committee was selected from the Board members and charged to work with the Interim Executive Director to review and recommended modifications to the By-Laws. These recommended modifications to the By-Laws were sent out to the Board in time for review so they can be acted on at this meeting. After stepping through each suggested change and discussing them, a motion was made, seconded and approved to accepted the changes to the By-Laws as recommended by By-Laws Committee and eliminate the bracketed sentence in 8.4.3 referring to tiered voting.

A revised copy of the by-laws will be distributed with the minutes.

Membership

In the Membership section of the By-Laws, 6.4.1 states the Membership responsibility includes payment of annual membership fee as recommended by the Board of Advisors. The question was asked if the Board wanted this fee worked up for presentation at the next Board meeting. It was discussed that this would be a nominal fee to provide administrative support for Board meetings not to exceed $1,000.

It was noted that the campus survey results stressed that the Alliance has a useful purpose, but there was concern about the continuation of current funding. Campuses stressed there was no way they could come up with the funds needed to keep the Alliance going at its current level of funding.

The Interim Director was charged to present a plan for membership payment at the next Board meeting.

Roles and Responsibilities

At the March 2nd Board meeting the Interim Executive Director was charged with developing the Roles and Responsibilities document for the Board. This document was shared with the By-Laws Committee for their input into its development. This document can be given to new members of the Board for guidance. A motion was made, seconded and approved to accept the document as distributed with the deletion of the word draft.

EDI Update

ASU has gotten some transcripts for testing against the RBA259 program.

Interim Executive Director Update

• Status of Functional Workgroups- They have nominated individuals for the chairperson position. The Interim Executive Director was reluctant to move forward on voting until the Board officially voted on the By-Law amendments. A file containing all the primary contacts has been sent out. An updated file will be sent when all the Chairpersons are identified.
• Status of Brass Ring Contract- This was discussed earlier while the Director of Procurement was at the meeting, but basically procurement worked with Career Connections to develop a master contract. Career Connections had sent individual campus contracts. The revised contract should be FedEx today to be signed off by the appropriate people so this project can move forward.
• Baseline Services Review - The results of the baseline services review were distributed to the Board. This information will sent out electronically to the Board and the Functional Workgroup.
• Campus Survey results - Paper copies of the recapped Application Manager and CIO surveys were distributed to the Board. After the Board has a chance to review these, if there are any questions or you require more information contact the Interim Executive Director.

It was announced to the Board that two seats are available for SUN training. One seat each for SUN 118 and SUN 288. These classes need to taken in the April/May time frame. Fill out the registration form and email it to Fred so he can get it scheduled.

The Chair briefed the board about the SETA Conference.

RFI Matrix and next steps
There was much discussion around what are we suppose to be accomplishing; what is the goal to be database/web enabled or web based; in light of new information is it as obvious that we need to leap to Banner? After much discussion some of the responses were that there is not overwhelming reason to go to Banner at this time; at this time not in a position to make a major change so we should enhance what we have; nothing that we learned from the RFI process justified a change at this time. This opens the door for ongoing interim solutions to meet baseline services.

A motion was made, seconded and approve as follows: Due to a number of circumstances that have changed since our original discussion about the potential of changing our strategic directions, the changes in SCT's position on PLUS, our identification of the potential alumni interim solution and the information we obtained through our RFI, there is no longer an urgent need to lead to a strategic decision change and we should defer that decision until sometime later this calendar year.

PSP Status

A handout from PwC was distributed to the Board along with a detailed staffing matrix. The board gave its approval at its last meeting to move forward with the funding of this project. All the Alliance staff, two Microsoft developers one from ASU and one from UNCW, some staff from WCU for functional testing and content, a Development Lead and a Graphic Designer will be working on this project. The Project Kickoff meeting is scheduled for April 3rd at 2 p.m. at General Administration. Team will come together for the first time. Remote staff will live here Tuesday - Thursday. A question was asked if there was someone on the staff familiar enough with Oracle and the answer was yes. This process will be views as "Skills Build".

Other

The NCSA Board representative has volunteered to do the Alliance Update presentation at the UNC FRS Conference in Greenville for the Interim Executive Director. This presentation would not allow the Interim Executive Director to be at the PSP Kickoff meeting next Tuesday.

The TLT conference in Wilmington was discussed. It was agreed that the Board members would try to attend to achieve a better understanding of what the TLT is doing and how the Alliance can work with them. Since our May board meeting is scheduled for this same time it was agreed that the Interim Executive Director would look at options for the Alliance Board meeting at the TLT Conference. UNCW volunteered to help with these arrangements.

On April 16th the TLT Symposium sponsored by the TLT Collaborative will be held at NCSU.

ASU has verbally agreed to participate in the Pillar Partner Program with Campus Pipeline. Some other universities participating are Notre Dame and Pepperdine. They will meet quarterly for two years.

Board went into Executive Session.