Case Study – State Universities Retirement System of Illinois
Company Profile
The Governor and General Assembly founded the University Retirement System in 1941 as an
administrator of benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. In the following years, the
system grew to include other universities, colleges, and affiliated agencies throughout the state.
In 1963, the system adopted its current name, State Universities Retirement System (SURS).
SURS employs 120 individuals in its Champaign office and provides retirement, survivor,
disability, and death benefits to over 180,000 members throughout the world.
Business Drivers
SURS’ image system was IBM’s Content Manager for iSeries. The software has done well for
SURS, but did not receive the same development drive that other IBM ECM products
experienced. This conclusion was reached after much research working with IBM to divulge their
future plans for the current IBM Content Manager for iSeries product line. As a result, SURS
decided to switch to a different product, allowing SURS to move forward with its in-house ECM
strategy.
Key expectations of the new system include:
- A new user interface that is conducive to the way the staff operates
- Document annotations with security
- Business Process Management (BPM) to re-engineer business processes, shorten cycle
times, and provide productivity stats - Email integration to save member correspondence in the permanent file system without
scanning - Electronic forms to allow employees and members to do “self-service” functions without
the need for paper forms
Product Decision
SURS selected IBM FileNet Content Manager as its core content management solution. Filenet
combines powerful document management with ready-to-use workflow and process capabilities
to automate and drive content-related tasks and activities.
- Serves as the core content management, security management, and storage
management engine for the family of IBM FileNet P8 products - Combines universal content management and advanced document management
capabilities with industry-leading Active Content process capabilities to drive unstructured
information for better and faster use in your organization - Delivers active management of enterprise content across the enterprise regardless of
what repository it resides in - Maintains secure control over metadata, process and compliance activities while
managing highly customized, transactional content delivered to the right place at the right
time - Streamlines document management tasks by providing extensive versioning and parent-child
capabilities, approval workflows and integrated publishing support - Provides the tools to deploy turnkey solutions that handle complex document types using
out-of-the-box workflow and process capabilities
Our Solution
Based on MRCIT’s extensive migration experience between disparate Content Management
systems, MRCIT proposed to SURS the following high level phases that in parts overlapped:
- Installation and setup of the new system
- Design, build, setup and test phase of the new system functions
- Bulk migration of existing data
- Soft or hard cutover weekend
- A concurrency period (for soft cutovers) where both the source and target system
are maintained and updated at the same time - User Training
- System and User testing and adjustments
- Turn off & decommission source system at the end of concurrency period
In SURS specific case, MRCIT recommended a soft cutover. This means that the source
systems will not be turned off immediately following the cutover weekend. Instead both systems
will be updated with the same new incoming documents. SURS will be able to revert back to the
source system if problems necessitate this step.
The following diagram shows the implemented migration process in more detail:
