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Community Colleges and Technology >> Getting the Edge on Institutional Goals
3/31/2005
For a large California system, new technology meant dramatic change and enterprise improvement; for a growing Southern institution, solid positioning enhancement was the plus.
LACCD CIO Tony Tortorice:
User resistence could have stopped
ERP success dead in its tracks.
"The technology worked, but
we knew there was a problem
when we had to have
'how to use a mouse'
training."
The Los Angeles Community College District is one of the largest community college districts in the United States. With nine colleges in the Los Angeles area, it serves over 130,000 students and has the full-time equivalent of about 100,000 students enrolled in its programs—one-third of the total number of students in the entire 23-school California State University system. Yet, in spite of its large student population, LACCD receives less than half the per-student reimbursement that the Cal State system receives from the state coffers, and that’s a very real problem for a community college system trying to serve its constituents well.
ERP at LACCD: Moving Users Out of the Dark Ages
Like most community colleges and systems—most institutions of higher education in general—LACCD has long been charged with finding ways to improve operations in order to better serve students, faculty, and staff, and compete effectively in the higher education marketplace. Unfortunately, during an era of serious belt-tightening, the college system had not been able to keep pace with the ERP improvements that so many other school systems had found ways to introduce. The decades-long lag in efficiency was seriously compromising the college system’s ability to compete and deliver.
Simply put, the job of effectively serving its massive user base had become cumbersome due to antiquated technology. LACCD’s DEC/COBOL system for financials and human resources had been state-of-the-art way back in the ’60s, but in the 40 years since, the system had evolved into a brittle and creaky contraption that required a group of “indispensable experts” to maintain it. Even worse, as the system had aged, its inability to respond to real-time needs became not just a frustration, but a liability in an environment where staffers needed accurate information on demand. The ability to track expenses and pay vendors had been seriously hindered, for instance: In some cases, the school system was taking 180 days or more to make payments.
Combating age-old resistance. Remarkably, it wasn’t just the expected obstacles—budgetary constraints and cost—that were hampering LACCD’s move to 21st century ERP; as it turned out, replacement of the nearly four-decades-old system was being seriously hampered by user inertia. LACCD had acquired SAP (www.sap.com) R/3 software for financials and HR in 2000, and had implemented core financial functionality such as general ledger, controlling, materials management, and purchasing the next year. But even though the initial goal was to use the system “out of the box,” without any modifications to the screens or the processes, to the many campus users unfamiliar with newer technology, the prospect was daunting.
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