Jim Behm (Michigan), David McCartney (Ohio State), Glen Blackler UC Santa Cruz, Erik Lundberg, Washington
UMich – Currently running PeopleSoft (Student, Fin, HR) Click Commerce, Blackbaud. Investigating IaaS for the Student system and planning others.
Ohio State – Currently running PeopleSoft (Finance, HR, and Student) converting Finance to Workday and then HR. Exploring Workday Student. Timing 3 years for finance, 5 years for HR.
UC Santa Cruz – Banner, PeopleSoft, custom IdM on Solaris. Moving it all to AWS by Spring 2018.
Washington – Most modern ERP is 30+ years old on Cobol mainframe. Moving HR/Payroll to Workday, others to follow. Launching in June 2017. Completely restructuring business processes around HR, creating a single service center. Then will tackle Finance. Lessons learned – don’t try implementing software without redoing business process. Looking at how to create sustainable organization capable of tackling these huge projects over 15-20 years.
What impact has your cloud move had on your IT staff?
Bentley University: Didn’t take into account the level of effort involved in regression and security testing. Unanticipated costs and resource issues.
Notre Dame moving ERP to AWS. Had a big impact on storage team who don’t need to do what they used to.
Harvard moving Peoplesoft HR into the cloud. Looking at it as a people issue, not technology. Very sensitive data and people who manage it on premise are invested, but don’t have the skills in the cloud. Don’t want to rely on the cloud team’s expertise. Holding Peoplesoft Day once a week with a consultant who has expertise moving Peoplesoft to AWS, the cloud team, and the Peoplesoft team, working together to solve problems and remove barriers. Building continuous integration and lots of automation. Arizona doing that too.
Ohio State gutting the data warehouse and rebuilding from scratch. Not sure yet where it will end up.
How have you dealt with information in the cloud and the security ramifications?
Ohio State – Workday is different in terms of access than something like Box. Running into challenges getting enough visibility into the system. Concerns about ability to get logs and information they can consume.
UCSC – people don’t understand the different between SaaS and IaaS. Having to educate them on the local responsibilities still inherent in moving to AWS.
If you chose SaaS how did you enlist your campus and business partners to sacrifice flexibility of the current way for business standardization? How challenging was this?
At Cornell HR decided to move to Workday without consulting IT initially. Was a wake up call for IT in terms of commoditization.
Oren Sreebny 