As we are beginning our transition to Workday, yet again, the issues surrounding data integrity, definitions etc. which I am fond of writing about, are surfacing. Despite the fact that Chaos theory in itself is a huge field and I don’t necessarily understand all aspects of it, its vastly simplified definition struck a chord with me.

“Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. […] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.”

and

a quote from Edward Lorenz “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

The take home lesson (a stretch, I understand!) from this is “We are beginning a major administrative systems project and we are essentially dealing with a lot of (deterministic) dynamic data and we have a golden opportunity to get our initial conditions right so that at least for a long time to come we can avoid divergence and chaos”. 

We have Banner and because the software itself has not kept up with emerging needs of the community, there is a huge divergence that has been introduced in institutions like ours. Because of changing landscape of our needs, regulations and so on and so forth, which, software like Banner are not agile enough to implement and deliver in a reliable fashion and quickly, we have gone and bought into other software that satisfy our needs and spend a lot of time and resources in integrating all of that data. It is safe to assume that the initial conditions (such as decisions, governance so on and so forth) have a lot to do with where we are. It is really not wise to go into them now because we don’t have all the facts.

Despite the fact that all vendors say they have APIs and therefore integration is a piece of cake, it turns out to be a lie more often than not. We are struggling with one integration because for reasons that we just cannot understand, the vendor has decided to treat dates as plain text fields and have developed their own definition of what relational data is! Go figure.

Our hope is that a modern system like Workday incorporates many of the lessons learned. But most importantly, we need to get back to some reality checks too, in other words, let us spend time to start with better initial conditions. For example, one of our agreed upon goals at the College level is “We will use the tools as-is whenever possible”. Indeed this gives a lot of flexibility to not use the tool as-is, but guess what, Workday does not allow customizations like other administrative systems do. They allow configurations that allows us the flexibility.

This is a huge step in case you have not realized. To get everyone to agree to such a principle as the first principle is not that easy, but all of us have been burned so severely that we have been able to come to this conclusion. The College is taking this so seriously that we are vigorously re-examining several business processes ranging from time recording to the number of payrolls.

So, I feel good that between a good, modern, solid software platform and a great group of people at the College who all realize that we need to move from simply talking about administrative efficiencies to actually implementing them, we are off to setting what we believe are better initial conditions. Another thing we are committed at this point is a commitment to re-examine and reset as needed, be it processes or data itself. Since the platform promises to support this, it should be easier than before!

Of course, there is absolutely no way to know if your initial conditions are good because only the future will tell. All you can do is to set them carefully and strategically and hope for the best!