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COVER STORY: Enterprise Systems: Risky Business?
9/23/2005
Besides being the largest customer, Cal State’s comfort level today is based a) on an intimate connection with the technical people inside Oracle/PeopleSoft who are working on the merger of the two product lines, and b) on a carefully cultivated relationship between the highest management levels of the Cal State system and Oracle. Despite the merger, Cal State is well on its way to completing its ERP project. The Chancellor’s Office and 21 of the 23 campuses are operational on PeopleSoft (now Oracle) HR and finance modules. Student Administration is the culminating phase, and 11 of the 23 campuses are already live with that. “We’ll probably be about a year late getting all the campuses up,” says Ernst. “The delay is due to budget conditions and other internal factors, and isn’t really bad for a seven- or eightyear project. The Oracle takeover didn’t slow down the project at all.”
Reconcile to Complexity and Change
Cal State was heavily committed to a complete PeopleSoft solution when the Oracle takeover loomed. By contrast, the Maricopa Community Colleges’ commitment to PeopleSoft was only part of a more complex plan. Maricopa already had a multivendor architecture up and running, including Oracle financials and PeopleSoft HR. The geographically dispersed college system wanted to simplify things by moving its 10 distinct, legacy student systems over to PeopleSoft Student Administration.
| Insider Tip |
|---|
| “Market share with similar higher education institutions is the key to vendor sustainability; the ability to keep enhancing the product over the years. Some institutions look at functionality first, but that is our last criterion. If you look at market share, you assume the functionality is built in.” —John Bielec, Drexel U |
So when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, Maricopa ended up no worse off, and may actually stand to benefit from the merger. “We backed into integration,” says Huish, who has responsibility for the project. “It d'esn’t cost us anything to believe in Project Fusion [Oracle’s plan to meld PeopleSoft’s applications with its own]. We already have an investment in these systems. If Fusion d'esn’t work out, then we’re best of breed. We had reconciled ourselves to that beforehand.”
Huish says he is relatively relaxed about whatever transition Maricopa may go through as a result of the merger. For one thing, Maricopa has deliberately kept small the number of modifications to the software, which will ease the pain of any conversion. Second, Huish feels that Maricopa selected its student software package on the basis of its rich functionality, which gives his product an edge in the melding process. “It looks like what we knew as PeopleSoft Student Administration is going to have a large footprint in the successor product. That makes us think that the transition is not going to be very difficult.”
Finally, Huish relies on a safety strategy that is independent of vendor and product, performing a careful businessprocess analysis. He says, “How expensive a transition is depends on how good an idea you have of how to automate your business processes. If you have started to lose your institutional memory, and if it’s only the software itself that remembers what your business processes are, then it d'es get expensive.”
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