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Outsourcing or Out of Business?

10/11/2005

By John Webster
PeopleSoft Programs Director
Center for Remote Enterprise System Hosting (CRESH)
Dakota State University

The timestamp says Wednesday 8/24/2005 11:46 AM. The subject line reads “UCIS 182-81 PeopleSoft Tools.” It is the final e-mail I will receive from Tulane [University (LA)]. Forty-eight hours later I receive a phone call, informing me of the evacuation of the school. The soft southern voice still ech'es in my ear, as if to say, “This is just a minor inconvenience, I’ll talk to you next week.”

According to the Association of American Universities (www.aau.edu), more than 30 colleges and universities along the Gulf Coast were severely damaged by hurricane Katrina. Tulane (www.tulane.edu) was among the hardest hit. Its 13,000 students will not return this semester, awaiting the school’s projected January reopening.

For me, Katrina changed the way I will address Disaster Recovery (DR) planning. Much like post 9/11, this is a good time for schools to revisit disaster planning—or the lack of it—in preparation for the next campus-killing event we all know is out there.

No longer can a DR plan mean sticking a duplicate financial disk in your pocket on the way home. Schools cannot put off DR planning until the next semester in favor of other pressing projects. This is the time to approach disaster planning with the same vigor as our business counterparts—as an imperative for survival. Katrina happened and so will another…somewhere. Maybe to a lesser extent in terms of sheer land mass, but it will be no less horrific to the devastated institution(s).

Schools across the country have opened their campuses to students uprooted by the storm, offering them reduced or waived tuition for the semester. Educational organizations such as the Sloan Consortium (www.sloan-c.org) are working to provide creative and meaningful educational experiences for the 150,000 ‘school-less’ learners—through offerings such the Sloan Semester (www.sloansemester.org), an educational venture with the Southern Regional Education Board’s Electronic Campus and nearly two hundred schools providing hundreds of ‘no cost’ online courses for displaced learners. In short, everyone is doing everything they can to help in this disaster, but what about the next one? Starting today, how is your institution going to prepare?

In the 2005 Educause Current Issues Survey (educause.edu) DR did not make the top 10 list for Human or Financial Expenditures or as a Time-Consuming issue. Paradoxically, Disaster Recovery was listed as number 8 on the Potential to Become More Significant. I am sure it will be considerably higher on the next survey.

This is not to say that plans are not in place for disasters. Quite the contrary. North Carolina State and schools in Arkansas have done a remarkable job, as have the Pennsylvania colleges and universities with their Ready Campus program (www.readycampus.org). However, while these are examples of schools working on a tough issue, are they representative of what institutions are doing, in general?