Business & Administration

Enterprise Systems is primarily responsible for the University's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Banner, and its related and underlying systems. Throughout 2021, the ERP group stayed extremely busy closing 572 incident tickets and fulfilling 687 service requests. A part of those requests was writing code, interfaces, and reports to help in the delivery of $20M of Emergency Relief Funding to 9,593 students. Maintenance and upgrades to Banner, DegreeWorks, Oracle, and Xtender are projects to themselves, but other projects and initiatives completed in 2021 included:

• Transitioning to Slate for a more sophisticated recruitment process, switching our purchasing cards vendor from SunTrust to JP Morgan Chase, overhauling the University's procurement process from Vendor Center to Jaggaer, and converting a new print vendor for end of year tax documents;
• Implementing a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to increase the security of traffic serviced across the Banner F5;
• Integrating Banner with:
  • a new application for Dining Services,
  • EverFi to provide workplace training to students and employees, and
  • PeopleAdmin for HR application, onboarding, position control, and performance review;
• Creating automation to load new Minimum Hire Rate adjustments;
• Responding quickly to COVID-related requests that required Banner modifications and data sources to track Federal Mandates;
• Coordinating the OneAuburn and Data Governance/Data Warehouse teams to create scalable automation with our source systems, create several new API connections into our warehouse, and support new releases of Salesforce.

EndPoint Solutions and several OIT teams, including collaboration with Distributed IT units, worked together to provide system management and security improvements. Some of these projects and initiatives included:

• Konica Minolta project, which saw a complete switch of our print services campus-wide;
• Project Starship, which set a standard for security software and protocols used for all devices used on the Auburn network;
• Windows Firewall group policies;
• HELC, onboarding the Harris Early Learning Center, located in Birmingham, AL;
• Universal Print Service for Azure;
• Android management.

Providing direct support to customers is a major element of any IT organization. In addition to the IT Service Desk mentioned on the Student Education page, OIT also offers endpoint support.

The Service Delivery team had significant projects go live in 2021. The ServiceNow group launched the Agent Now mobile app, which enables all IT agents to deliver support from anywhere. The group also went live with enhancements to the Change Management process, several AU Software Request Forms, and the software matrix.

The SharePoint Admin was quite busy developing enhancements to Vendor Vetting (Distributed IT are now involved in the approval process), University Awards, Promotion & Tenure, Professional Improvement Leave, COVID Forms, and Chemical Engineering Graduate Annual Reporting.

The WordPress migration to the cloud project ramped up in 2021 and should finish in 2022.

The Identity & Access Management (IAM) team oversees the management of electronic identities for Auburn University employee, students, and affiliates and what systems they have access to. They also oversee the access management systems, such as Duo (multi-factor authentication) and CAS (single sign-on). 2021 was a project-heavy year, which saw the following:

• Fischer Identity Governance & Administration (Phase I);
• Multi-Factor Authentication - Completed a two-phased project to add MFA to all alumni and retiree email accounts;
• Contactless Access and Payment Project - Completed Phase I of the contactless ID card project in conjunction with Student Affairs for Student IDs;
• AU Daily for AUM – Development of a process by which Communication and Marketing can distribute selected information to AUM employees;
• KnowBe4 – Development of a locking/unlocking process for KnowBe4 training.

The IAM team also worked on enhancing the onboarding and off-boarding process for employees through email notifications about their account information.