New Arrivals of ADP Systems

 

CITYMIS which stands for City University Management Information System consists of numerous administrative systems. These systems are developed in-house by the Administrative Data Processing (ADP) Section of the Computing Services Centre with the aim of supporting administrators throughout the University in their day-to-day administrative operations.

In the second issue of the Network Computing we had already introduced the scope of service of the ADP Section; this time, we would like to give an update on "What's new". Since our last contact, four systems have been added to the list of CITYMIS. They are the Job Recruitment System, SAO Counselling Services System, Library Acquisitions Sub-system and Research Project Monitoring System.

Job Recruitment System

The Job Recruitment System is designed to assist the Personnel Office in recording and maintaining job application data; keeping track of the application progress; automating the issuance of the correspondence; and producing statistical and monitoring reports. It covers the following stages of the recruitment process: advertising, receipt of applications, shortlisting, interview and making offer. The system is tightly integrated with the Personnel Record System, the core of the Administrative Systems for the Personnel Office.

SAO Counselling Services System

The SAO Counselling Services System is designed for the Student Affairs Office (SAO) to handle the counselling programmes application. Through this system, students can apply for the counselling programmes without going to the SAO in person. All they need to do is to enroll directly through the computer terminals. These applications will then be processed by the SAO staff in front of their desktop computers. This system not only enables students to inquire the up-to-date programme information and their enrolled programmes information through the computer link in a more concise way but also assists the SAO staff to maintain and access the programmes information in a simpler, faster and more systematic manner.

Library Acquisitions Sub-system

The Library Acquisitions Sub-system is a sub-system of the Library System. It is designed to assist the staff of the Library Acquisitions Section to handle the ordering operations, goods receipt, accessioning co-ordination, ledger account management and payment. It is integrated with the Library Cataloguing Sub-system as well as the Order and Commitment System of the Finance Office. By doing so, the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) information is shared thus duplicate input of the commitment and payment data is eliminated.

With the Library Acquisitions Sub-system, the acquisition staff can easily lookup whether a book recommended by reader has already been purchased; predict accurately and promptly the outstanding order amount and cumulative payment amount and hence the account budget that is still available; lastly, greatly improve the data security and data consistency between related systems.

Research Project Monitoring System

The Research Project Monitoring System is developed with the objective of assisting the staff of the Research Office in monitoring the progress of every research project within the University. Users start entering data into the system upon receipt of proposal applications. From then onwards, users can update and enquire the project details throughout their life cycle when required. With the implementation of the system, users' workload is much alleviated since most of the routine work is automated; in addition, the retrieval of project information is much faster.

As our computer users become more and more mature, we forecast the demand for IT support will increase accordingly. It is no doubt that more new systems will join the CITYMIS in the foreseeable future.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk