Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
COVER STORY: Enterprise Systems: Risky Business?
9/23/2005
ERP software partnerships are essential to operating most campuses today. The risk of relying on those partners is real, but it can be managed.
Jay Dominick has spent much of his 10 years as CIO at Wake Forest University (NC) dealing with the fallout from corporate actions that were well beyond his control. First, Bi-Tech, the company that provided Wake Forest’s financial software, was acquired by much larger SunGard (www.sungardbi-tech.com) in 1995. As a result of that takeover, Wake Forest set in motion a switch to PeopleSoft’s (www.peoplesoft.com) financial and human resources systems shortly thereafter.
Then, in fall 2001, Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) abruptly announced that support for the computer and operating system Wake Forest’s student applications ran on would end in 2006. So, the university decided to migrate all of its systems, including the new PeopleSoft financial and human resources applications, to SCT’s Banner (www.sctbanner.com). But just after Wake Forest signed the Banner contract in July 2003, higher-ed-focused SCT was acquired by the now mammoth international corporation SunGard. The circle was pretty much complete, except that, around the same time, Oracle (www.oracle.com) began its move to acquire PeopleSoft. That meant that even if Wake Forest had stayed with that company, the university would have faced the uncertainty of another transition.
On the other side of the country, though, at the very moment Oracle was launching its PeopleSoft takeover, the Maricopa County Community College District (AZ) was immersed in a 10-college PeopleSoft implementation. “Some of our customers worried that our student system project had just become an instant legacy system,” says Darrel Huish, who is associate vice chancellor for Information Technology at Maricopa.
- Prove safety
- Go for market share
- Consider the client base
- Reconcile to complexity and change
- Influence vendor direction
- Weigh industry clout vs. higher ed market share
- Assess relationship vs. market share
- Consider higher ed community software
- Find partners in the community software world
- Cover other means of reducing risk
- Put M&A risk into context
The World of Mergers
Mergers and acquisitions, changes in corporate priorities—these are realities in the commercial world, and they have recently affected almost every one of the vendors that supply administrative applications to higher education. Yet, veterans like Dominick and Huish have learned how to position their institutions to ride the wake of the storms of corporate upheaval in relative safety. They and other corporate-savvy CIOs have learned how to pick the safest partners, how to structure the relationship with their partners to mitigate risk, and how to run the affairs of their institutions in a way that insulates them from abrupt changes on the vendor side.
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
