A student’s view of their University finances

Next year, students will have a better way to see their University finance information in the MyEd portal. We’re taking advantage of the University’s “Core Systems” project, which will replace the Finance and HR system, to update the mechanism for connecting MyEd to the finance system.

EA’s role in this is to help design how the IT components will fit together to provide this service. In addition to MyEd and the Finance system itself, a couple of other components will be involved. One is the system for taking online payments, which plays a similar role to the shopping baskets that we all know from shopping online. Another component will translate the raw financial data into a form that makes sense to ordinary mortals. (The project will work with usability experts to make the new UI easy to understand).

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been working with the technology leads of the relevant areas to agree these components will collaborate. The technical lead for this work has created some rather nice diagrams that explains the process and the architecture to non-technical staff.

We are defining the interfaces (APIs) between the components and agreeing a standard data model. This approach will allow the project team to partition the work into separate packages, each of which can be built and tested more-or-less independently of the others. The result will be a more flexible design that will give students a better service.