Not many universities in Indonesia that pays a detailed attention to IT Management like the ones conducted by Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, or more familiar as Unika Atma Jaya, Jakarta.

The university optimizes its IT in every aspect of its academic activities, either in operational management or building its students culture.

Danny Natalies, Head of IT Unika Atma Jaya, says that the university sees IT as an inseparable part of the campus daily life.

Danny says that the university concern to optimize its IT is based on Yayasan Atma Jaya vision to make the students comfortable as well as to fasten and bring efficiency to the administrative management process. “All uses the IT. The students can pick a subject and its schedule through it without having to queue, fill a form and get approval from their academic advisor manually,” Danny explains.

Since early of 2000, Unika Atma Jaya has been really serious in building its IT infrastructure. Not just for taking care of academic administrative but also other modules for finance, HR management, facilities maintenance, filing, learning management system, and executive information system.

More than just Infrastructure

The willingness to build an IT-based education environment needs more than just infrastructure. New problems coming in as IT infrastructure develops.

“Once we integrate the entire modules, there was a rapid data increase. We have to maintain hundreds of gigabytes of production and transactional data. This require an extra attention,” says Danny.

In certain times, the university IT system gets more critical than a bank, for example during students registration. “It is the moment the university receives income, if we lose a second, we lose a certain percentage of income for one year,” says Danny.

Unika Atma Jaya has its own IT masterplan since 2003 that contains the guideline for future development. Then the university has a stage 2 IT masterplan developed together with PT Mitra Integrasi Informatika (MII), a subsidiary of Metrodata, as consultant partner. The masterplan contains various solutions to deal with the university concerns such as Capacity Planning and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP).

Capacity planning is needed look into the university IT condition. If previously the university bought 7 or 8 server a year, since 2012 the university only bought one. “Capacity planning is like a self-portrait to identify the current infrastructure condition and to take a certain next step,” says Danny.

There are three stages in drafting capacity planning. First data sampling consisting of new network topology, list of IT address, hardware inventory, including interviews with server, application and network administrator.

Second is to analyze the data’s gathered. And third is creating a report in the form of written document containing a summary and proposal for future development of Unika Atma Jaya IT infrastructures that includes hardware, network and data center.

DRP is considered important as a standard procedure to anticipate unexpected disaster, both natural and human caused. With the DRP, Danny is confident to deal with critical situation.

DRP drafting goes into four stages, which are Risk Assessment (identifying the potential risks and probability, the potential damage and how to reduce it); Business Impact Analysis (analyze critical business functions and the impact if the function is not working optimum); Strategy Formulation (deciding IT solution and strategy so that user can use it in any condition); and Training Policy (socialization program to the entire user and later making a policy and procedure).

Partnering with MII

In establishing an IT culture at the university, Unika Atma Jaya decide to work with MII due to its long records of good partnership between the two institutions.

“We see MII as a mature consultant company that gives a real solution. Like a doctor, MII does not give us the drugs that cause addiction,” says Danny.

From the service aspect, MII service exceeds the expectation. “MII consultants always open and ready to take questions, even when it passed the contract period,” Danny adds.

This made Unika Atma Jaya to trust MII to contribute to its IT development projects. "We met with the right partner, why should we seek another place?” says Danny.