Kristian Thornley is the Senior Solutions Architect at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT). Kris's main responsibilities include the design and development of solutions for projects resulting from CPIT's recently implemented Information Strategy. These solutions include the modeling and automation of CPIT's critical business processes along with the design and development of a cross institutional data warehouse. Kris's main focus is the migration of CPIT's legacy application environment into a flexible, agile, highly-available architecture.
Following on from last year’s presentation of the development of an Information Strategy, by CPIT ICT Director, Mark Marshall, CPIT’s small Information Systems Team has embarked on an extensive suite of projects to implement the Strategy. From a legacy of inconsistently defined business processes tightly coupled to siloed legacy applications, the team has begun the development of a Service Oriented Architecture connecting these legacy systems to create a holistic view of business operations. Orchestration of Services is achieved using, the BPEL compliant, IBM Websphere Business Process server to enable the creation of comprehensive business applications reflecting complex business processes. By leveraging pragmatic development techniques, complex business processes can be segmented and staged for rollout achieving early ROI whilst still being agile enough for future development and extension. In addition CPIT wants a “single source of the truth” for business decision making and has implemented IBM Infosphere Datastage for the development of a data warehouse and Microsoft Reporting Services for business reports. With a small tightly knit team CPIT has taken the innovative approach of developing an agile canonical data model shared between Data warehouse Dimensions and Process server Business Objects which can achieve an operational synergy at both the end user layer and middle tier ESB mediation development. A typical example of this holistic approach to service development has been the creation of a staff costing datamart with the integral development of a work instruction and timesheet application. Staff costs, budget and actual, for permanent staff were easily accessible from FMIS but this did not provide the full picture. Part-time/casual costs are high and needed to be better managed. Hundreds of paper work instructions and thousands of paper timesheets have been replaced by the online business process supporting submission, signoff and import into payroll. Managers can now see a full picture of all staff costs from high level summary dashboard with drill down to individual transactions.