Penn State Turns to SOA to Automate Workflow

Pennsylvania State University has overhauled the system it uses to manage its business processes and is now poised to begin running it campuswide using a new service-oriented architecture.

After working for 18 months to get new business process management (BPM) tools ready to replace a workflow system that was more than 15 years old, the University Park, Pa.-based school this fall will begin testing the system using noncritical processes.

Once the test is completed, the system, called Workflow, will be extended to more-critical processes over the following 12 to 18 months. Officials said the system is expected to quickly reduce the cost of running the 75-plus business processes used by about 16,000 university employees in 23 locations.

Penn State will deploy its new workflow system campuswide.
Image Credit: Gregg Grieco

Single Interface

When it's fully implemented, Workflow will provide a single interface to all of the school's business applications and will use single-sign-on and role-based access methods, said Ron Rash, senior director for administrative services at Penn State. "It had to be very, very easy to use in a small office, but it also needed to be very robust and auditable for our confidential financial transactions," he said.

The Workflow system is based on a BPM engine developed by Fujitsu Ltd. and sold by Software AG as the Crossvision Business Process Manager tool. The Workflow system also uses Darmstadt, Germany-based Software AG's enterprise service bus, called Crossvision Service Orchestrator, to access data from disparate back-end systems in various university departments, Rash said.

Although Rash declined to disclose the cost of the project, he maintained that it will reduce costs and improve processing times at the school.

For example, noted Beth Hayes, Workflow project manager at Penn State, the new system will allow supporting documents to be attached to a business process, which will eliminate the delays in approval caused by users waiting to receive paper documents.

In addition, the Workflow system will allow users to access systems based on their roles, a feature that will ease the IT maintenance requirements for 7,900 approval paths, Hayes added.

The system will also allow individual departments, which "literally have hundreds of processes they would love to automate," to undertake such tasks on their own, Rash noted.

One of the first paper forms to be automated in the new system will be undergraduate travel request forms. Automation could cut the length of that process from three weeks to less than a day, Hayes said.

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Baltimore, said organizations such as Penn State are increasingly realizing that "dealing with BPM in a service-oriented way is really the only way to deal with heterogeneous IT resources."

In addition, while lines of business are reluctant to fund SOA projects, they usually are more than willing to invest in to solve a highly visible business problem like BPM.