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A short thread on IT failures in higher ed organizations.
UCSD changed the majority its enterprise software (i.e. systems for payments, funds, HR management, student records, etc.) over the summer to match the @UofCalifornia's (very expensive) overhaul of its systems.
UCSD changed the majority its enterprise software (i.e. systems for payments, funds, HR management, student records, etc.) over the summer to match the @UofCalifornia's (very expensive) overhaul of its systems.
Just UC Path (the shared platform operated by the @UofCalifornia) ballooned from being a $170 million dollar project into a $945 million dollar monster. ( https://www.bsa.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2016-125.2.pdf).
Suffice to say, the almost billion-dollar project is unlikely to bring savings/efficiencies, but was a wonderful windfall for UCOP and the software providers (like @infor) who, according to the auditor, signed contracts that didn't commit to specific deliverables.
Several months into the transition, individual campuses have invested millions in getting their systems to interface with UC PATH (UCSD spent $13,000,000 just this alone) and are facing massive additional costs for overhauling their internal, ad hoc systems.
UCSD is very opaque about costs, but rumors say that our Enterprise Systems Renewal has come at a cost of more than $40 million along with iron clad contracts with procurers like Oracle and SAP that involve forced upgrades into the future.
So how are things going? Terribly. Staff are frantically trying to deal with the poorly delivered systems. Funding information is unavailable because all the previous records were corrupted and accounts are being reconstructed 'by hand'.
The only thing that has been actually implemented is collective stress. Yet this was COMPLETELY predictable because, guess what, sociologists of organizations have been writing about IT failures as classical examples of organizational failure.
But what we haven't explored enough is how these organizational failures interact with the increasingly precarious position of higher education. As we burn through a billion dollars in a mediocre IT system, our President is calling for $150 million in curtailments (furloughs)
And yet, the administrators who administered this mess are completely immune from its effects. Rethinking higher education will necessarily have to imply rethinking how the costs, risks and rewards of investments are asymmetrically distributed within our communities.
