Progress
The project
started in early 2005. A full Management Committee, comprising
the Chief Information Officers and the directors/representatives
of the IT departments, was established to set the directions
and monitor the development of the project. Each institution
takes turn to be the chairman of the Committee. The Chief
Information Officer of CityU, Dr J Yu, was elected to be the
chairman for the first year.
The scope
of the Project includes the setting up and operation of a
technical environment for testing the new versions of Banner
as well as other development work, Banner upgrade, enhancement
of Banner to support Chinese, common system development, joint
consultancy and training, etc. As of end of November, an ERP
server had been set up and three different versions of Banner
including one for testing Chinese localisation been installed
for further development and testing.
Chinese
localisation is one of the key tasks. Banner is a US-based
software, and implementation of Chinese is well known to be
complicated. Though the vendor of Banner has been expanding
the software to accept a few more languages in addition to
English, the support of Chinese is still at a very preliminary
stage. In addition, we are not satisfied with a simple switch
of display from English to Chinese. In the Hong Kong context,
there are data elements which have to be stored and displayed
in both English and Chinese. The Committee has endorsed a
strategy that the internal code be "Unicode" and
that the standard character set be based on Hong Kong Supplementary
Character Set (HKSCS) developed by the Hong Kong SAR. A Task
Force has also been established to work on this area. It has
identified initially what sort of data elements that require
both languages and made recommendations as to how to store
and display these data. Currently they are working out a mock
on the joint ERP server for further deliberations.
Workshops
and Seminars
Four
workshops/seminars have been conducted during the year. The
topics are: Banner Finance, email as an integral part of ERP,
leave information system and Banner 7 training. Despite that
the topics were intended for the member institutions, in the
spirit of collaboration and experience sharing, some of them
were extended to all the eight UGC funded institutions as
well as Vocation Training Council, Open University of Hong
Kong and Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
Looking
Forward
The project
is progressing well. A solid foundation has been laid for
further experimentation and development of ERP in the remaining
duration of the project. More seminars might be organized
to facilitate knowledge sharing of ERP for the member institutions
and other universities as appropriate.