I am so excited that Dr Paula Johnson has been named the 14th president of Wellesley College. I was unable to be on campus today, so I just listened to her introduction and her brief speech through the livestream. As with all the changes, I am sure that the campus will be re-energized and I am looking forward to the changes that await us.

On a different note, I am happy to be able to publicly say that Wellesley College has decided to move to Workday as our ERP. As you can imagine, this is another huge change for us and there is both considerable enthusiasm and anxiety about this change.

The College has had Banner as its ERP for 21 years and this system has served us well. There are several reasons why we have decided to move and I am not going to go over all of them. However, I will highlight a few.

Systems like Banner, which were developed several decades ago, are suffering from their inability to satisfy the needs of the customers in many different ways. Their installed base is large and diverse and this, combined with some of the choices of technologies makes it very difficult to deliver systems and services that keeps up with the needs of students, faculty and staff. When the paradigm shifted from client-server model to the web, we saw similar issues with the lag for adoption on the part of many software. Similarly, access to information from anywhere on any device with modern interfaces is something older software are unable to catch up with.

Secondly, when a software has been in use for such a long time and configured to work a certain way and changing those is not easy without considerable disruption, it becomes a big deterrent to progress. Many of our institutions are eager to make business process changes for the benefit of the users, but they are non-trivial if the underlying administrative systems are not agile enough to accommodate them.

As I have mentioned before, when business logic is tightly coupled to the underlying software, (which makes it easy for the software provider, but not for the users of the system) the software tends to dictate how we should conduct our business, rather than providing us the flexibility to conduct the business the way we want to. Registration is one example, where Banner like systems are written to offer a few options that simply are not flexible enough to recognize the way some liberal arts colleges would like to register their students. Or degree audit and prerequisites. This is not to say that Workday like systems don’t impose constraints on users like us. They certainly do, but by separating the configuration from the code, they are able to provide more flexibility than others.

Older systems were developed for handling transactions well, so a whole new industry was born for supporting reporting and analytics. Similarly, workflow, something fundamental to the way we conduct business today, is an afterthought, clunky and basically unworkable in systems like Banner. Reporting, Analytics and workflow are integral to a modern system like Workday. Granted that no system can deliver all reports anyone can come up with, but if the way to get ad hoc reports is integrated in the system, it makes it that much easier.

And finally, being a modern system, Workday is written with mobile first philosophy and they have spent a lot of time and effort in designing the user interface. There are many other reasons that we discussed over several months to come to this conclusion. I am very happy with the conclusion and we have planned to move HR, Finance and student modules in that order, over a 4 year period. This is how long these transitions take!

When I talk to people they ask me “Wouldn’t Workday be like Banner is today 20 years from now?” It depends on how Workday wants to evolve. Knowing what I know about their architecture, their attention to user experience etc., I believe they have a much better chance of adopting to new technologies than something that originated some 30 years ago.

Time will tell!