NetworkUMass Released

As an alum, I received the invitation to join the online community being implemented by the President's Office. Being the curious type, I immediately started playing around with it and adding pictures, stories, finding friends, and updating my profile. I can certainly see where something like this has potential to be a neat social networking tool for alumni. I question whether others will join it and set up their profiles. I really liked that the network promoted people from other UMass campuses -- except Amherst, but I hope in the future this gets further expanded to include them. There seem to be a lot of bugs with this that should have been resolved prior to going live -- for example the UML network didn't allow you to send to the @alumni.uml.edu site; the education profile uses drop downs that are not fully configured; campus involvement page has strange data elements such as Willing to Mentor? (what I'm not sure); Recognition Name; Addresses under school activities (do they want to know where I lived in college???); and some other stuff that I am confused about. This is all new and I suspect it will get better over time, but for now I'm left frustrated and not intrigued to return to use it.... but I will!!!

HEUG Conference 2008

I was able to attend the 2008 Higher Educations User Group (HEUG) conference for PeopleSoft. It is amazing to look back and realize I've been doing this for 10 years now and during that time met a lot of great (and smart) people. Many of the consultants from the very beginning are still active within this broad marketplace, but many are at different employers or even started their own companies. I find these conferences a mix of eductional and cathardic. It is sadly refreshing to hear about other campuses struggles as it reinforces that we aren't alone in challenges like reporting, security, and overall end user satisfaction. On the good side, we are up and running on all modules so our focus is different than a campus new to PeopleSoft. I love hearing about campuses just starting out as they have so much energy and visions of greatness.

Adding around your PeopleSoft applications seems to be quite popular. Be it a 3rd party recruiting tool like SuccessFactors, an address cleansing solution, or some sort of document imaging product. Then there are consultants of all shapes, sizes, and flavors --- how do you find the one that is right for your campus?

All in all, it was a good conference and nice to see where UMass fits in the spectrum of services. Clearly we are not where we want to be, but we have accomplished much thanks to the great work of our campus business staff.

I think this internet thing might work...

This summer I've spent some time getting into different social technology tools such as this bloging site. This is on top of Myspace, facebook, Second Life, Digg and LinkedIn. I've got more profiles out there than I know what to do with. I don't know how people can keep up with them all. I seem to like this blogging stuff the best as it is a simple way to keep a little diary. I've now set up a couple of them, but still haven't found a good way to update them on regular basis and with what information??? Anyway it seems like there is always something new to look at and use to help manage my internet life. Between updating my own sites and viewing other people's information it really takes a lot of time away from my Red Sox cheering.

Payroll problems continue to plague ASU

I must say I struggle a bit with this story as I can argue both sides of the coin. I've had great pleasure of being at conferences with both Adrian (ASU CTO) and Max (Project Manager) and actually find them to be great leaders within the ERP field and their approaches are very unique within higher education. I've personally seen how long projects can be dragged out and I'm not sure we get enough reward for the dollars we have to invest in the additional consulting hours needed for project delays. Never-the-less our cautious UMass strategies have kept us out of the newspapers for these kind of major flaws. I'm sure people can debate that more testing at ASU would have saved issues, but at what point do you just decide to go for it and move into production. These are tough decisions that people need to make as many of these projects run at a burn rate of $150,000 or more per week in consulting costs alone. I'm sure ASU would do things differently if they knew the severity of the issues that would be encountered, but don't assume that their decision making process was flawed. It is just the beauty of hindsight which allows us to question them now.

read more | digg story

Impressions of Community College Students’ IT Experiences

Interesting details on student comfort and use of technology broken down by community college vs. four-year college. I'd really be interested in seeing how much this varies by sections of the country. I found it amazing that 9% of students still rely on dial-up access. It was reassuring to know that 99.9% use email and use it on a daily basis as primary communication means.

read more | digg story

A Look at Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0

This is an article from one of UMass Lowell's peer institutions on their first look at the latest version of PeopleSoft's student administration system. At UMass we desparately need to find a way to upgrade to this version as our existing solution is not meeting needs of students and faculty -- and staff would benefit from a newer system too as they've adapted to life in PeopleSoft, but still haven't been able to realize efficiencies as that was our original release.

Steve Grantham, "A Look at Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0," Campus Technology, 4/30/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=46669

Read Article

The Changing Role of Enterprise Systems: From EDI to Internet Icons

This is a fantastic presentation I saw at an educase conference on enterprise computing. This took place in May 2007 out in Chicago. There is about an hour audio file of this presentation which is valuable for anyone assocatied or interested in higher education information technology.

Read Article

Listen to Presentation