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EDH was
developed as a key component of the Advanced Informatics Support
(AIS) project, which aimed to provide cost effective user-friendly
solutions for reducing administrative overheads throughout the
organization.
From leave requests
to purchase requisitions,
over 100 different forms were in use at CERN. These were filled
in manually, retyped, approved, signed, and finally retyped again
into the appropriate system - not the most efficient way of doing
things.
EDH's objective
was to replace these paper based business procedures with streamlined
electronic workflow, validating data against corporate databases
and automatically generating the end-result with minimum human
intervention.
The first implementation
of EDH, launched in 1992, ran on CERN's central mainframe
computer. Soon after, as central computing gave way to distributed
computing, this was replaced by a client-server version, with
everyone at CERN having an EDH application on their desktop.
In 1998,
as CERN moved towards becoming the world's first truly global
laboratory, EDH moved to the Web
- itself invented and developed at CERN in the early 1990s.
The year 2000/2001
sees the completion of EDH's Web version
which will now become the standard EDH system for CERN users world-wide. |
