Towards a Common Public Service Infrastructure for Swiss Universities

Forschungsplattform Alexandria https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch | 22.12.2015 Due to the Bologna Declaration and the according procedures of performance management and output funding universities are undergoing organisational changes both within and across the universities. The need for an appropriate organisational structure and for efficient and effective processes makes the support through a correspondent IT essential. The IT environment of Swiss universities is currently dominated by a high level of decentralisation and a high degree of proprietary solutions. Economies of scale through joint development or shared services remain untapped. Also the increasingly essential integration of applications to support either university-internal or cross-organizational processes is hindered. In this paper we propose an approach for a comprehensive service-oriented architecture for swiss universities to overcome the current situation and to cope with organizational and technical challenges. We further present an application scenario revealing how Swiss universities will benefit of the proposed architecture.