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COVER STORY: Enterprise Systems: Risky Business?

9/23/2005

By John Savarese

Spoon River was impressed by the functionality of the software in areas like communications management and a customized portal, but they were equally impressed by the personal attention they got from the Jenzabar team, with the company’s strategic implementation process that was based on identifying the college’s values and setting measurable goals. Spoon River was also not worried about the turbulence that some older customers had gone through during Jenzabar’s acquisition of four smaller software companies and the redesign of their technology base.

Insider Tip
“How expensive a transition is depends on how good an idea you have of how to automate your business processes. If it’s only the software itself that remembers what your business processes are, then it d'es get expensive.” — Darrel Huish, Maricopa Community College system

“You can leapfrog over steps that other companies have gone through,” Jabusch explains. Relative size was not a concern either. As he points out, “We’re a small college, and we know that being small d'esn’t necessarily mean that you can’t be a leader in what you are doing.”

Even with all that in mind, Spoon River prudently built features into the contract with Jenzabar to minimize the college’s risk, including review of the consultants assigned to the project and a hold-back of a percentage of payment until the college is satisfied with the implementation of the software.

Still, despite the care that Spoon River has taken in choosing its software partner, Jabusch is adamant that the success of the implementation depends on the college itself. “We’re counting on ourselves, not the software package. You shouldn’t put a lot of faith in the product you buy, if you’re not making a change in how you do things.”

Consider Higher Ed Community Software

For many institutions, the turmoil in the corporate world has increased interest in software development projects driven by the higher ed community itself. Is that the ultimate way to mitigate the risk of commercial partnerships? It’s a bit early to tell; to date, there is no comprehensive community-owned student or HR system. The Kuali Project (www.kuali.org), a community-driven financial system, is just now a yearling. But uPortal (www.uportal.org) and the Sakai collaboration/ learning environment (www.sakaiproject.org) have gotten plenty of traction.

Rutgers University (NJ) provides a living laboratory of how a community source project like uPortal can serve as the architecture to make a coherent whole out of many different kinds of applications. Rutgers links together Oracle financials and a homegrown financial system, as well as a homegrown student application. But none of that is evident to users of myRutgers, who see only the uPortal interface.

“The portal is the cornerstone of our enterprise architecture,” says Bill Thompson, associate director for Enterprise Systems and Services at Rutgers. “Some day, we may get out of the business of having a homegrown SIS. We manage that risk by building applications in a loosely coupled way.”

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