John McCall is the Associate Vice President for Finance and Controller for Texas A&M University. The departments in his organization are University Accounting Services, Financial Management Operations and Student Business Services. These departments provide the full range of central accounting and financial services for the university. As such, they are heavily involved with FAMIS and its functions. Because of this heavy involvement with the existing system and their extensive customer interaction across campus, Mr. McCall receives much input and feedback on the current system’s pros and cons and what would be desired in a future system.
Earlier in his career at the University of Texas-Austin, Mr. McCall witnessed the extreme difficulty in attempting to transition from a home-grown mainframe system to an off-the-shelf system. The Texas A&M University System was in a very similar situation with its mainframe system. To support a multitude of business processes, thirty-plus years of evolution and modification adapted FAMIS. It would be more efficient and less disruptive to modernize the system around existing business processes instead of adjusting the numerous business processes to an off-the-shelf system.
Mr. McCall looks forward to a 21st century UX/UI for FAMIS users and more intuitive interfaces and navigation among screens for business processes. He also anticipates a much faster and more efficient process for making requested updates and enhancements to the system due to updated software code instead of the mainframe.
So far, the modernization project seems to be a success. Mr. McCall is very pleased with the successful early conversion of the code and progress with ensuring that business processes are properly executed. He wants the financial application stakeholders to know that this project is on budget and on schedule. A modernized FAMIS will bring today’s technology to existing A&M System business processes without the disruption of third-party software conversion.