CASE STUDY OF ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS AUTOMATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS FROM ROMANIA

Abstract

Romanian Universities and those from the entire East-European Region are undergoing a long and arduous transition. Significant amount of money, coming from their own funds, the Government or from European funds, are being invested in order to increase the quality of the education and research. Considering that the changing processes require giving and receiving feedback from all the institutional actors, we have observed in the course of time that students’ interaction with the administrative departments has declined in what concerns both the popularity and the satisfaction.

The aim of this article was to introduce to the academic community an analysis, layout, and implementation of an, apparently simple, administrative workflow. This, in turn, will be emulated in an electronic environment, thus permitting to highlight the main functional and organizational problems of the social infrastructure present in Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania.

The research methods used include the functional analysis of the existing administrative process, designing the most appropriate implementation using content management tools including digital certificates, and an adequate method to manage the entire process. The efficiency of the solution is derived from the fact that the development is quite rapid; it implies the exploitation of common applications (for all the actors), such as e-mail services of web browsers and, last but not least, the fast adaptability of the workflow specific to the implementation used without using compiled code.