MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN ROMANIAN

UNIVERSITIES

Ana-Ramona Bologa, Razvan Bologa

Computer Science Department, Academy of Economic Studies, Piata Romana 6, Bucharest, Romania

Gheorghe Sabau, Mihaela Muntean

Computer Science Department, Academy of Economic Studies, Piata Romana 6, Bucharest, Romania

Keywords: The paper Romanian universities, management information systems, ERP systems, integrated information

solutions.

Abstract: This paper shortly presents the situation of the Romanian universities regarding information systems

implementation and deployment. The information presented is the result of a study regarding the current

state of the Romanian universities in the process of data and information system integration, performed at

the end of 2007 in 35 accredited universities. This study was used as a base for identifying and analyzing

the main factors of influence for developing an integrated university environment and for identifying

concrete action directions for accomplishing that integration.

1 INTRODUCTION

The implementation of an information system

dedicated to the university management is nowadays

a fundamental option for the greatest majority of the

universities that understood the new trends at

international level. A higher-education information

system can be used as a vehicle for professionalizing

and transforming the traditional universities and for

developing an integrated and standardized Romanian

higher education environment, in the European

context.

The present paper will present the results of a

first phase of a national research project, “Integrated

Information Solutions for Competitive Management

in Romanian Universities”. The objective of this

first phase was to perform a study of Romanian

universities in order to obtain a complete view over

the present situation of existing management

information systems, their integration level and the

problems faced in using those systems.

The following phases will analyse the solutions

that foreign universities apply, and finally make a

pilot implementation in the Academy of Economic

Studies of Bucharest.

2 PROBLEM FORMULATION

AND GENERAL CONCEPTS

Identifying the most important specific aspects

related to the implementation of university

governance systems in Romanian, and generally

speaking Eastern European, universities is the focus

of our current research. Local universities have

different process from their Western counterparts

and that is why implementations of solutions

developed in Western countries had limited success.

The incompatibility with international solutions

has led to a situation where local universities are

using a high number of various small and poor

information systems developed in-house or by small

local companies. Almost every faculty or department

has its own software applications, developed in-

house, applications that use various operation

systems, tools, databases and protocols. Those

applications are managed by that specific

faculty/department and there is no integrated view

over the activities developed in the university.

Our team has achieved a study about the current

state of the Romanian universities in the process of

data and information system integration.

This study is going to be used as a base for

identifying and analyzing the main factors of

425

Bologa A., Bologa R., Sabau G. and Muntean M. (2008).

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 425-428

DOI: 10.5220/0001904904250428

 SciTePress

influence for developing an integrated university

environment and for establishing concrete action

directions for accomplishing that integration.

We used as a starting point the list of all

Romanian universities, offered by the Ministry of

Education (Romanian universities ), which consisted

of 56 accredited state universities, 32 accredited

private universities and 24 temporary accredited

private universities.

3 APPLICATION INTEGRATION

LEVELS

Through our research we will use the conventional

three-tier approach. When trying to connect to a

certain application, its architecture must be

considered. Most applications have a three layer

structured architecture (Microsoft - Integration

Patterns): Presentation level – is the level that

displays the information for the final user and allows

him to input data; Business logic level – contains the

business functions that action on business data; Data

level – accomplishes the persistent data storing in

data stores. This level is also called resource level.

Similarly, there are three connection ways

between applications and integration level

(Microsoft - Integration Patterns ): Presentation

level integration – the integration level can extract

information from the user presentation level using a

technique called “screen scraping”; Function level

integration – the interaction between the integration

level and the business logic level is accomplished by

application or service interfaces; Data level

integration – the integration level can move data to

and from data level.

4 SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

MANAGEMENT ON

ROMANIAN MARKET

The first phase of our research was to gather data

about the current commercial systems used by

universities. As expected, these were marginal

applications developed by local companies with a

limited presence. Our field studies revealed that the

number of players on the market was reduced, the

following being the most representative:

SICOB (Information System for Public

Organization Management) should be a result of a

project financed in 2001 by the Ministry of

Education in a first attempt of covering the gaps the

Romanian universities presented in the field of

applications for institution management. It was

developed by a Romanian software company and

proposed three modules: Financial, Research and

Payments. This solution was implemented in about

40 public universities and some of them are still

using it.

University Management System (UMS) should be

an integrated information system dedicated to higher

education institutions (public or private). Developed

and provided by a Romanian company, Redpoint SA

since 2004, UMS ensures the management of

academic processes, students, academic staff, tuition

fees, admission process, graduation process,

scholarships, lodging and accommodation, diplomas,

etc.

Naum Consult System was developed by Naum

Consult SRL and has been provided since 2003. The

system has modules for: accounting, provision

management, assets management, student

management, HR, financial.

GESCO 2001 should be an information system for

the management of higher education institutions

schooling process developed by a Romanian

company, Genisoft Group SA. The system offers

many facilities such as: student performances

management, budget assessment at department,

course and allows a correlation with data from

SICOB accounting module.

5 STUDY RESULTS ANALYSIS

5.1 Implemented Solutions Analysis

The study was conducted on a number of 35 of the

Romanian universities, including both public and

private institutions and the full range of Carnegie

segments. This can be considered a representative

sample of Romanian universities, encountering a

percent of 31.25% of total accredited universities.

This study addressed a number of questions such as:

- What kinds of information systems were developed

within Romanian universities and for what

functional areas?

- Do those information systems succeed in fulfilling

the information requests of Romanian universities?

- Which were the major suppliers of software

solutions for Higher Education Management on

Romanian market?

Almost all universities have a financial solution,

and Sicob was the major vendor for the financial

ICE-B 2008 - International Conference on e-Business

426

module, encountering 36% of total number of

implementations, while Naum Consult follows with

a percent of 12%. Anyway, most universities use

self-developed solutions for financial and accounting

management activities.

Most universities felt the need to implement a

Students management module, so that 77% of

universities currently use such a module. 41% of

those preferred the UMS solution, 11% chose Gesco,

11% chose Naum Consalt and there is an important

percent of 37% that still use self developed

solutions. Although the Student module it wasn’t

very popular two or three years ago, the universities

have caught up and now most of them use a Student

solution, even if not a professional one.

Self-developed solutions are very popular for

Financial and HR/Payrolls modules, as they were

preferred in order to make cost savings but also to

cover the incomplete functionality of the existing

software. Another important remark is that big

universities use all the HE ERP modules,

commercial or self developed. Small universities, on

the other side don’t use commercial solutions,

because of their cost. Public universities always use

Financial and HR/Payrolls modules, regardless of

developer, as they have to make mandatory specific

reports. Our study indicates that the number of

players on the HE ERPs market is small. Most

universities use in-house or low-end solutions. The

chart 5.1 presents a comparison between the main

four software solutions used in Romanian

universities.

Table 5.1: University application analysis by architecture

and implementation technologies.

Gesco UMS Sicob

Operating

system

Windows

2000 Server

Windows

2003, Unix,

Linux

Sun Server

Database

SQL Server

Oracle

SQL Server

MySQL

Progress

Workgroup

Development

tools

Microsoft

.NET

(ASP, Web,

XML, C)

Java

J2EE,

SWING,

JSP, Struts,

EJB

Progress

Actuate

Developer

Reporting

and analysis

Embedded,

based on

XML, self

transfer in

.pdf or .xls

Embedded,

integrated

with MS

Office

5.2 Integration Level

A real process level integration is presented only by

University Management System solution. As its

developer, the company Redpoint, initiated

collaboration with SAP corporation in order to

develop the following modules: financial

accounting, management accounting, payroll, virtual

library, this solution has a big chance to become a

complete and competitive software package for

university management. In Naum Consult we have a

partly data level integration by using a common

database in several different modules. SICOB, on

the other side, is a simple accounting solution, so the

integration can be made only external, by another

application or support platform. As for the university

in-house solutions, there the integration is almost

inexistent. The modules doesn’t communicate

between them, at most they are exported from one

module, processes and transformed and then

imported into other modules.

5.3 The Example of the Academy of

Economic Studies, Bucharest

A preliminary analysis of the information system in

our university, the Academy of Economic Studies,

revealed the existence of 7 major independent

information systems, which are independent and

communicate with each other only by export files or

specially developed transfer programs. Here is a

short description of those systems and their

relationships with each other.

1. Student Management Application is a client-

server application that uses a Microsoft SQL Server

2005 database. Its interface was developed in Visual

Fox Pro and Visual Basic. It includes three modules:

a. Student Master Data: includes student

information, faculties, degrees and programs

information, their curricula, courses etc. It uses a

specially developed transfer program in order to

extract information from Admission Management

Application.

b. Student Academic History: includes a list of all

grades up to and including current term, earned

credit points, reprogrammed exams. The secretaries

are responsible for updates.

c. Student Bills: includes all kind of student fees,

charges, payments. Data are updated by the pay

offices (approximately 10 workstations).

2. Student Admission Management Application

uses as inputs data regarding student personal data,

their admission options, faculties and

specializations, student photos etc. It provides basic

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES

427

data for the Student Management Application and it

uses outputs from Student Bills module, in order to

check out tuition fees payment. This application was

developed entirely in Visual Fox Pro.

3. The Academy Web Site: centralizes all the

relevant information for various visitors category,

students, inside and outside the university. Data are

not automatically displayed by interrogating a

database, but manually filled in by secretaries and

then converted to HTML format. As a result, there is

a high incidence of human errors in data and many

out of date or incomplete on-line information.

4. Social Information System was developed in

Visual Fox Pro and includes four modules: Lodging

and accommodations-student lodging on university

campus; Lodging Fees; Scholarships and financial

aids; Transportation reimbursement-public

transportation expenses reimbursement. It imports

data from the Student Management Application.

Figure 5.1 Communication flows in the applications of the

Academy of Economic Studies.

5. SICOB is used for financial and accountability

specific operation.

6. Human Resources and Payrolls Application

uses Microsoft SQL Server database and includes 2

specific modules: Payrolls and. Human resources.

7. Library for Universal (L4U): a classic system

for library management that uses data exported from

Student Management Application and personnel

database, after a previous filtering and

transformation by a specially designed program.

There is also Web-based Virtual Campus

management application for distance learning

programs.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The Romanian learning system was recently

integrated, at least at a formal level, in the European

learning system, automatically bringing the need of

adapting to European practices (e.g. ECTS).

The capacity of Romanian universities

information systems to respond to the demands and

the challenges of European education system was

very modest until now. Universities should realize

that they are not so drastically different and given

that, they should collaborate in order to influence

vendors to become more sensitive to higher

education needs. This way, ERP vendors should

provide some best practice models to reduce the

costs of ERP implementation.

European integration of Romanian higher

education system might benefit from the support of

European funds. But, in order to access the

European funds, the universities should manifest

interest, make congruent efforts and put some

pressure on the decision factors, on one side, and, on

the other side, the political support is also very

important. For the moment none of them seems to be

strong enough.

REFERENCES

Ana-Ramona Bologa (Lupu), ERP for Romanian Higher

Education, the 8

Economic Informatics Conference,

“Informatics in Knowledge Society”, ASE, Bucharest,

p. 205-210, May 2007, ISBN 978-973-594-921-1;

Marti Harris, Michael Zastrocky, Jan-Martin Lowendahl ,

Magic Quadrant for Higher Education Administrative

Suites 2006, Gartner Industry Research 16 September

2006;

Ion Lungu, Ana-Ramona Bologa, Adela Bâra, Vlad

Diaconiţa – Integrarea sistemelor informatice, Editura

ASE, Bucharest, 2008;

Microsoft - Integration Patterns http://download.

microsoft.com/download/a/c/f/acf079ca-670e-4942-8a

53-e587a0959d75/IntPatt.pdf;

The list of accredited Romanian universities, http://

www.edu.ro;

Ana-Ramona Lupu, Razvan Bologa, Gheorghe Sabau,

Mihaela Muntean, The Romanian Universities in the

Process of Data and Information, in The Proceedings

of The 7th WSEAS International Conference on

Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and

Data Bases (AIKED'08), Feb. 2008, Cambridge, U.K.,

p 527-532.

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