Posts Tagged ‘Workday’
I read the piece in New Yorker titled “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers?” and enjoyed it very much. It is by Atul Gawande who is a surgeon and an author. It describes the issues we all face every day – technology is changing fast and we want our respective communities to adopt them, but it is a monumental challenge. I am of course simplifying it, but thats the crux of it. There is one thing in the article that stuck with me – “Mutation and Selection”.
Basically the author compares how the medical profession operated under a very different paradigm early on, where, every physician basically operated independently that suited their particular modes of operation. This is mutation part. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems tried to bring standardization, better sharing of information amongst the physicians and most importantly, gave access to information to the patients readily. This is the selection part. Obviously this is not a trivial adjustment for those who operated independently and the fact the EMR systems, which are in their infancy, are not optimal. At least not yet.
Higher Ed institutions face exactly the same issues. The whole issue of centralization of systems is the “selection” part and the proliferation of multiple systems (Best of Breed) is the mutation part. What is the right balance between the two is so complex and dependent on the institution. But, the article describes how a neurosurgeon and his team is trying to “mutate” the “selection” system (EMR) so that their needs can be accommodated. This is what we would call customization in the old ERP systems, which turned out to be a terrible idea for a variety of reasons. However, in the more modern systems, such as Workday or Salesforce, accommodations to mutations are much simpler to manage through “configurations” and “business processes”. This would be a “controlled mutation” of sorts.
But, whats the problem with supporting best of breed?
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I was at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that was held from Oct 30-Nov 2 in Denver. I have accepted to be a member of the Nominations Committee of EDUCAUSE. There was an early meeting on Tuesday, that I needed to attend, so I arrived on Monday, Oct 29. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in mid to high 70’s. But then, it was all downhill, cold and a day of rain.
EDUCAUSE’s commitment to diversity and inclusion was evident everywhere this year. It all started with the Nominations Committee where we discussed the importance of creating a diverse pool of candidates for the Board. You could see it in messaging, programming and social media posts. I have been going to EDUCAUSE for quite a while and the lack of diversity was striking at the beginning, but it has continued to improve, but we have a long way to go.
I was active in twitter during the conference and you can see my tweets here.
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Month of October has been a little crazier than usual. I attended Workday Rising 2017 in Chicago earlier this month, which was a great experience. The conference was huge and I got to meet very interesting group of people. Keynotes were interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary, but some of the sessions were fantastic. All of us who attended learned a lot. Then I organized a NERCOMP Professional Development Opportunity on finding a unified alumnae system on Oct 19th. It was well attended and the attendees benefited from hearing from all of us who are in various stages of finding a solution to this.
I was in Philly for EDUCAUSE from Oct 31 till Nov 2nd and will be leaving for Hong Kong next week. Here is the scoop on Workday…
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Arbitrary boundaries, whether geographical or timewise, have existed for a long time and on the one hand, it is understandable that they serve a purpose, but in some cases they seem silly. I understand how we all are energized as we approach Fridays, looking forward to the weekend. In reality why does it because weekends are another couple of days. However, if I took a day off on Wednesday, it just doesn’t feel the same as a Saturday and Sunday, though it really shouldn’t. The same way, Jan 1 of every year is just like every other day. But we all think of it very differently and act that way.
Most of us set up new plans, predominant number of which fail within a few days. Why would we not do it on Feb 1? Or on one’s birthday? It is not the same. In that vein, I would like to look at what is in store for us in 2017, yet another new beginning!
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Last week I attended the annual conference of EDUCAUSE, the organization of Higher Ed technology organizations. It was attended by some 8000 professionals and vendors. The meeting was held in Anaheim, CA. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the meeting this year. You can see my tweets during the conference here.
I joined a few colleagues for a dinner to celebrate the retirement of a long term CIO from a small liberal arts college. This colleague is a terrific individual and though I have seen him in the liberal arts college gatherings and EDUCAUSE over the years, I have gotten to know him only in the past 6 years or so. He is a true leader who is a champion for collaboration and has taught us many things about how to be successful in collaborations. We will miss him very much. The dinner conversation was terrific and many attendees reminisced about the good old times (as in the ’80s and ’90s). (more…)
Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT
I decided to take a week off, but it is turning out to be more like “work from home”. This is life, I guess. No complaints. I did get a few rounds of golf in.
As we are going through the Workday implementation, it is very clear that Workday has a very clear and strict process for a reason. We all have opinions on the process itself, but what I see is that it imposes a level of discipline that we are all not used to. Especially, they have a concept of “In Scope” and “Out of Scope”. This therefore requires us to think very deeply about what we want in scope early on. There are slight variations on the theme that are always supported, it is just that the typical large variations that we are all used to that is not possible.
Why? Because, those of us who have been in this business already have experienced the pain of scope creep. In tech related projects, it goes like this – techies first want as complete a project plan as possible; it doesn’t happen, so they complain; then they deliver some initial prototypes; functional offices are thrilled to see it; their creative juices flow and they now want this and that; a lot of times some techies feed this by saying, “yeah this can be done but you should really see this cool stuff”; such back and forth then becomes the way the project is handled; the project crawls; the ex-enthusiastic techies are now disgruntled and say “I can’t wait to get off this project” because this has become a drag and they want to move to the next exciting project; finally, both the techies and the functional owners complain that the other party is not delivering.
Instead, how about saying “folks, we have a common set of goals. This requires discipline. Let us define what is important for day 1. You should really let the creative juices flow, because this is very important for us to construct a solid foundation, but remember, not everything you ask for will be possible on day 1. Just park the less important ones for later. And please don’t say that everything you come up with is equally important”. In other words, creativity is to be accommodated, but within bounds. If only we can all get to this point, our projects will be better and move faster.
I always feel that Higher Ed administrative projects are treated like research projects. They tend to be explorations. However, researchers set broad and general goals for a research project. This won’t work for administrative projects. We need to be more precise about the end game. The outcomes are not always predictable in a research project, and they typically tend to branch off in other areas. This is the nature of the research game. Unfortunately, the same exact method may not be suitable for administrative projects.
As always, we are engaged in a lot of exciting things and I thought I would touch on a few items here.
MOOCs – Two of our self study courses that opened in January are drawing to a close. Italian Language and Culture: Beginner and Personal Finance, Part 1: Investing in Yourself have been very well received. They have had much higher engagement percentages going into last couple of weeks (between 9 and 12%) than the typical MOOCs. And the learners are loving the courses. Please see here for several additional courses that are opening up in the next few weeks. A couple of them have been run before, but are redone to be shorter ones which seem to be more appropriate for this medium. Enroll yourself and enjoy!
Blended Learning – We are doing really great in this Mellon funded project. We continue to receive requests for support and experimentation. I strongly suggest that you view this website, especially the embedded video. Talking about blended learning, a second jointly taught course between Davidson College and Wellesley is going great by the reviews we have received so far. Van Hillard from Davidson and Justin Armstrong from Wellesley have been co-teaching a first year writing course. These are truly collaborative projects involving faculty members, students, staff members from Research and Instructional Support and Library Collections. For example, Helene Bilis is planning to jointly teach a course with a faculty member from Smith for which they are working on a project on making a digital clickable edition of an 18th-century almanac that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. This book was acquired by special collections and a member of RIS team is assisting with digitization and the creation of clickable online version of this book!
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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.”
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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”. (more…)
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.
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Data integration is a fact of life for those of us who are in the information technology business. Since we are yet to invent a single system that does everything for everyone in an enterprise, it is inevitable that we have to support and deal with multiple systems. It is equally true that unless the data from these diverse systems are integrated, we will not be able to understand the data in a coherent fashion. With the proliferation of “best of breed” solutions we have a complicated mess in hand.
Most institutions have a large administrative system like Banner or PeopleSoft that is considered to hold the authoritative data. In addition, for the purpose of reporting, we all have a data warehouse or a data mart into which data from the central systems is inserted typically on a nightly basis. The general premise of this is that the administrative systems were originally designed to take in the transactional data and therefore optimized for that purpose. They were not designed for complex reporting. Combining both of these in one system means a drain in resources and everyone suffers. Modern systems like Workday claims to have designed their system in ways that you can do all activities in one system. When you have multiple systems, generally, the data is integrated with the administrative systems, though in some cases, directly into the data warehouse.
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