Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Electronic Banner Access Request (eBAR) Workflow – Portland State University

Replace paper form routing from Portland State University

Electronic routing – replaced two paper forms with Banner Self Service online form – uses Banner Workflow to route the request

Advantages of eBAR Workflows

• faster than paper request process
• can be routed to multiple users in parallel
• no time wasted delivering paper between offices
• no lost paper forms
• password delivery via BSS = security
• copy permissions from an existing user
• “I Agree” checkbox for Acceptable Use Policy
• dynamically routes to supervisor (right now user picks their supervisor)
• auto creates workflow account for supervisor
• supervisors can assign any workflow user as proxy
• created a way to determine segregation of duties when applying Banner user classes and in particular objects (requester must explain why they are requesting access that violates the segregation of duty conflicts)

Business Decisions

• Authn
  • Banner INB
  • Enterprise LDAP
• user creation
  • used workflow

Workflow Setup

• workflows can not span orgns but a workflow can initiate a workflow in another orgn
• TIP – design your workflow around your orgn not around Banner modules

Roles

• System Administrators = IT Staff
• Business Analysts = IT Staff, Banner Coordinators
• Request Approvers = supervisors
• HR Employee = Human Resources staff
• Banner Coordinators
• Business Affairs Director
• Account Creator = DBA
• eBAR Admin

Demo … run through Banner Self Service and Banner Workflow

Challenges

• modeler hangs when trying to validate model – had to reduce the number of activities in the model by moving processing to dB procedures, save results in temp tables, etc
• mapping external event parameters to workflow model – load all 30 parameters into a temp table before event fires, map one parm  to find others
• using javascript in custom activities – use a dbproc to gen javascript
• custom activity forms are very limited – create a custom activity with only a few text areas, use a dbproc and javascript to create the functionality

Lessons Learned

• design for easy maintenance – making changes to the Workflow model can be tedious – put as much into dbprocs to keep model simple
• design for user friendliness – generate HTML view to display over the Workflow form, use drop down menus and checkboxes, dynamically create these menus and checkboxes