DETROIT – Information technology is the lifeblood of a major research university. And, as any chief information officer (CIO) or budget director can confirm, keeping IT systems consistently available and at peak performance can take a significant bite out of an annual budget. At Wayne State University (WSU), CIO John Camp and his quality assurance team in the Computing & Information Technology (C&IT) Division not only deliver top-flight, self-service systems to students, faculty and staff, but they also have reduced costs and saved time by automating tests of the university’s major applications.

Developing procedures to identify and document functional processes in WSU\'s core applications, thoroughly testing them with automated scripts before bringing new systems online, and monitoring end-to-end service have led to improved system performance and annual savings of approximately $225,000. The effort also earned the university special recognition twice in less than a year from Campus Technology magazine, a leading publication focusing on information technology at higher education institutions.

In the August 2006 issue (www.campus-technology.com/mag_archive.asp), Wayne State is recognized as one of 16 “Campus Technology Innovators” for 2006, selected from almost 500 entries in the annual competition. Camp and his team were recognized for innovative work in quality assurance. “We are honored that our QA efforts have gained national recognition,” Camp says. “But it is even more gratifying for our IT team to know that we are making an important contribution to Wayne State’s role as one of the country’s leading urban research universities — and doing so in a cost-effective manner.”

In the magazine’s December 2005 issue, WSU is listed among the top 100 universities nationwide for its IT practices in higher education, specifically for creating a unified digital campus or portal to integrate access to university services and information (using a SunGard product called Luminis). The primary motivator for this initiative, which began in 2002, was that today’s students, faculty and staff expect the convenience of round-the-clock access to the services and information they need via the Internet.

It was then that the C&IT Division began implementing cost-effective methods to ensure the availability, reliability and integrity of the major applications and systems that provide these services — using quality assurance and testing products from Compuware.

Among the objectives early on was improvement of end-to-end testing of major applications while also reducing the amount of time and dollars spent on the process. Wayne State\'s information technology team also wanted the ability to conduct service monitoring of systems from customer locations.

“Most colleges and universities do not adequately test system changes before implementing them,” Camp explains. "So system implementations can take longer than needed, and additional staff resources are then required to fix problems."

To ensure that Wayne State maintains a solid infrastructure for running and monitoring the university\'s core IT systems, the QA team will spend the next two years completing test documentation and scripting for all the university\'s applications and further improving how IT testing is done on campus. The team also plans to expand the encouraging results of their QA approach to other areas, such as incident and problem handling, change management and disaster recovery.

Wayne State University is a premier institution of higher education offering more than 350 academic programs through 11 schools and colleges to more than 33,000 students.