Community Colleges and Technology >> Getting the Edge on Institutional Goals
For a large California system, new technology meant dramatic change and
enterprise improvement; for a growing Southern institution, solid positioning
enhancement was the plus.
LACCD CIO Tony Tortorice:
User resistence could have stopped
ERP success dead in its tracks.
"The technology worked, but
we knew there was a problem
when we had to have
'how to use a mouse'
training."
The Los Angeles Community College District is one of the largest
community college districts in the United States. With nine colleges in the
Los Angeles area, it serves over 130,000 students and has the full-time equivalent
of about 100,000 students enrolled in its programs—one-third of the total
number of students in the entire 23-school California State University
system. Yet, in spite of its large student population, LACCD receives less than
half the per-student reimbursement that the Cal State system receives from the
state coffers, and that’s a very real problem for a community college
system trying to serve its constituents well.
ERP at LACCD: Moving Users Out of the Dark Ages
Like most community colleges and systems—most institutions of higher
education in general—LACCD has long been charged with finding ways to
improve operations in order to better serve students, faculty, and staff, and
compete effectively in the higher education marketplace. Unfortunately, during
an era of serious belt-tightening, the college system had not been able to keep
pace with the ERP improvements that so many other school systems had found ways
to introduce. The decades-long lag in efficiency was seriously compromising
the college system’s ability to compete and deliver.
Simply put, the job of effectively serving its massive user base had become
cumbersome due to antiquated technology. LACCD’s DEC/COBOL system for
financials and human resources had been state-of-the-art way back in the ’60s,
but in the 40 years since, the system had evolved into a brittle and creaky
contraption that required a group of “indispensable experts” to
maintain it. Even worse, as the system had aged, its inability to respond to
real-time needs became not just a frustration, but a liability in an environment
where staffers needed accurate information on demand. The ability to track expenses
and pay vendors had been seriously hindered, for instance: In some cases, the
school system was taking 180 days or more to make payments.
Combating age-old resistance. Remarkably, it wasn’t
just the expected obstacles—budgetary constraints and cost—that
were hampering LACCD’s move to 21st century ERP; as it turned out, replacement
of the nearly four-decades-old system was being seriously hampered by user inertia.
LACCD had acquired SAP (www.sap.com)
R/3 software for financials and HR in 2000, and had implemented core financial
functionality such as general ledger, controlling, materials management, and
purchasing the next year. But even though the initial goal was to use the system
“out of the box,” without any modifications to the screens or the
processes, to the many campus users unfamiliar with newer technology, the prospect
was daunting.