This was yet another great summer for me and I am sure it is true for many of you. Now, the phase of getting ready for the start of the Fall semester begins. Gone are the days when this used to be the most stressful part of the support services, especially the technology side. The network bandwidth was never enough, students brought computers that would not easily connect to the network, registration systems were too slow because of the lack of compute power, so on and so forth. Most of these are non-issues, unless we want to make them into issues by introducing some unnecessary and overcautious administrivia in the middle.

All of our summer projects have gone really well, many of which I have already mentioned. Especially worth mentioning are Google Apps transition and Drupal. Given the relative enormity of these projects, we have made amazing progress in such a short time thanks to diligent and creative work by the respective teams. This in no way minimizes several other important projects we have completed, of course.

Transitions are never easy. However, the transition to Google has gone really well after our vendor committed the appropriate resources to correct some initial issues. We have moved just over a half of our faculty/staff group and over 1500 of the 1900 or so accounts of students (excluding the first years whose accounts were created in May). With the introduction of the Return Receipt feature, Google has provided the much wanted “history” function of FirtClass, which turns out to be not universally popular or wanted in Wellesley 🙂

Similarly, the Drupal team is hard at work to get a modified Wellesley design into Drupal and have figured out methods to transfer content from existing pages over to Drupal. As I mentioned earlier, it is great to see a group of people excited about a product – half the battle is won that way.

Talking about transitions, we heard last week that Sungard Higher Education, who supports Banner, will be merging with another ERP vendor – Datatel. There is considerable discussion on the EDUCAUSE CIO list about this. I am too tired of the ERP business to care!

Sorry to start a Monday venting…

The skinny on ERP is that they are bad software which are necessary evils. You cannot operate without them. Most of these were transitioned from earlier mainframe software where layers upon layers of new functionality were added over time. They cost a lot of money to maintain (you really don’t want to know how much we pay annually for maintenance!), and still continue to have components that require old software such as COBOL compiler to run parts of it. And, by the way, they also happen to be the only software, where, after paying all the money you pay, want you, the user, to do all the testing to make sure that everything will work for you after any upgrade, which in turn costs the institution a boat load of money annually. In case I have not already told you this, they also get away with charging annual increases to maintenance that is far more than CPI – 6% to 10%. And we have no choice. So, please don’t get me started!

So, what can we do to change this? If you want the real answer – nothing! This is why I don’t see much of a point in discussing this in the CIO listserve and this is why I have not bothered to respond. Why is it that we can’t do much to change?

• You choose the best possible ERP that suits your needs (in our case, Banner), change your business practices and stick with it. Once this choice has been made and changes to practices are implemented, it is not easy to revert.
• Installed base – We all have invested millions of dollars already in the software, enhancements, training of our staff and faculty and any change better be significantly better to undo everything and start over.
• The cost of transitions will be so significant that it would be very hard to convince the community that such a large initial investment is worth the trouble. Switching between two ERP systems is a rare occurrence and I am aware of one small liberal arts college which took this bold step.
• I am not aware of any ERP system that is built on modern programming paradigms and open architectures (with the exception of Kuali, which has its own problems)  that allows us to easily extend functionality. If there is one, we will all be considering it.
• The ERP vendors realized too late in the game that they cannot realistically develop a system that works exactly the same way for a big R01 University as well as a community college system or a small liberal arts college. This is precisely why frameworks and extensibility is very important.
• These are way too big systems for us to be developing them internally. This involves huge risks.

So, unless the open source community turns its attention to developing an ERP (along the lines of Drupal or Moodle, which are more of frameworks than the complete solution themselves; on the other hand, the folks participating in open source are very unlikely to touch anything administrative!) or a company like Google (who have the spare money, lots of creative people, already demonstrated that they can create software based on modern principles and is willing to take risks of this magnitude and share the resulting product) invests in developing a framework such as Android, our hands will remain tied and the terms will be dictated by the ERP vendors. Because of this, the vendors have no incentive to say, “I am going to take apart the foundational layer of the software and start over”. The cost of this will be enormous for them and .

It is like NY City Subway in some sense – it was built in the early 1900’s with the best available construction practices and extensions happened over time as needed. If one were to to construct a subway today, I am sure that this is not how it is likely to look and operate. The cost of ripping it apart and redoing is so high that no one is going to touch it with a 10 foot pole. Millions of users have no choice but to use the system. If only they know about the bad state that some sections of the subway may be in, there may be scary thoughts for a fleeting moment, but a thought like  “hey, millions of others are using it, so why am I so special?” will come up and life will move on.

However, having ridden the subway so much (including recent past) and knowing a few people who work for the NY City Transit Authority, I know how hard they work to make the system work best despite all the constraints. And most importantly, when they introduce a new train or route, they don’t ask the riders to get down and examine the tracks and rat infested areas.

On that cheery note, I shall rest.