Enterprise Environment
The enterprise environment is comprised of the Ellucian ERP suite of Banner products, third party products, integration work between the Banner products and campus IT solutions, as well as local development to support Texas Tech specific business needs.
Due to technology changes by Ellucian, the environment is undergoing a period of change at the ERP and local development level as described below.
ERP Environment
The Banner products are migrating to web pages developed with Java based technologies. Banner is comprised of two sections of applications known as Self-Service Banner (SSB) and Internet Native Banner (INB).
SSB will be known as Campus Applications and are used by the wider Texas Tech audience to facilitate single transaction based operations. Some examples are registration, faculty grade entry, web time entry, web leave reporting, etc. Campus Applications are developed using Groovy/Grails as the main technology. Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. Grails is an open source web application framework based on Groovy that stresses convention over configuration.
INB will be known as Administrative Applications and are used mainly by functional offices to facilitate large data entry, maintenance, and processing. Examples of Administrative Applications are course maintenance, student billing, payroll processing, budget maintenance, and accounts payable. Administrative Applications use Java/HTML 5 technology.
Together this shift in technology is known as the Banner Extensibility Ecosystem (Banner XE). TTUS IS has and will continue to participate in beta development partner groups and early adopters of the Banner XE initiative seeing this updated technology initiative as strategically important to the long term IT infrastructure.
Local Development/Integrations
Both local development and integrations are important aspects of work performed by TTUS IS. The technologies used in Banner XE are also used in local development and integration work. Using the same technologies in local work allows TTUS IS development staff to acquire advanced knowledge in the ERP software resulting in increased value to Texas Tech. Additionally, TTUS IS has undertaken various internal strategies to upgrade the software development process to achieve increased quality and faster delivery. Approaches such as automated testing and continuous integration allow software to be tested in an ongoing schedule resulting in higher quality and less rework. TTUS IS continues to look for cutting edge practices to improve software delivery providing added value to the Texas Tech System component institutions.