Bridges Update: Assigning Roles for PeopleSoft Systems

Fred H. Cantrell, Associate Vice President and Project Director

Due to the devolution of the State University System (SUS), the University of Florida will serve as its own fiscal agent and employer beginning July 1, 2004. The UF Bridges project was formed to implement an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) solution using PeopleSoft systems for finance, human resources and student administration. As a result, UF will replace most current computer systems with new integrated Web-based computer systems that will provide real-time information to users and improve business processes. UF Bridges has completed the design phase of the project and is now in the development phase.

Last week all academic deans, directors and administrative vice presidents of the university were charged with identifying who in their respective areas will be performing the various functions in the new PeopleSoft Financials and Human Resources Management System (HRMS). Individuals with authorization to use legacy systems will not automatically have authorized access to comparable PeopleSoft systems. These decisions are left up to each college dean or director but subject to review by the university’s auditors and testing by the Bridges project.

This assignment of roles to users is the first step in developing the role-based security that UF Bridges will use to control access to all new computer applications. Role-based security is fundamentally different from our current method of assigning access rights. We now use a variety of methods-some are ad hoc, some are based on affiliation, some are based on job title, and some applications are assigned by security administrators directly

Simply defined, a role is an assignable task for a given function. Examples of roles are Time Reporting-Approver or Hiring-Data Entry. The roles a user has determine what menu item(s) or task list(s) the user will see when they log on to the myUFL portal. Located at http://my.ufl.edu, myUFL is the gateway to all PeopleSoft systems. For more details about roles and the process for assigning them, please download the FAQ document on the transition area of the UF Bridges Web site at http://www.bridges.ufl.edu/transition/ .

The implementation of these new PeopleSoft systems is not only an opportunity to replace aged and non-integrated systems-and realize a long-awaited single sign-on to administrative systems-but also an opportunity for each college, department and division to thoughtfully consider its business processes, office policies, and personnel needs. We recognize the enormity of the task of going through each unit individual by individual but hope that you will find the exercise worthwhile and important.