Panel on SaaS for administrative systems
Ken – USC
John – Georgetown
Dave – Cornell
Steve – Carnegie Mellon
Mike – Brown
All have chosen Workday for their new HR systems.
Circuit breakers and off-ramps – discussions on how to end the relationship during the implementation if it turned out to be a wrong decision. Discussed in the contract stage.
Lots of discussions about what would happen if Workday didn’t hit its development milestones.
Working through the complexities of higher education payroll and hr with the vendor, educating the vendor, was complex. Working on sizing the project was hard. What do you do if the project goes over the estimates? Had to address that in the negotiations.
First phase was purely blueprinting, doing analysis and fit-gap analysis, then had another round of contract talks after that.
Had to spend time getting Workday to understand the special things about higher-ed, but also had challenge to manage change in the business processes to adapt to standard processes.
The HR people enamored of the service had no idea of the trauma it would cause in the rest of the IT ecosystem – things that data marts would no longer get because attributes weren’t there, etc. They had well over 100 integrations, and that work was not on the table in the project.
The vendor is a moving target that you’re trying to latch onto.
One campus is working through data elements bit by bit, coming to common understandings of what the data means for the first time.
When you look at the costs of SaaS versus a traditional ERP you save money because ERP upgrades are so expensive. Also you get disaster recovery with the SaaS solution.
Oren Sreebny 