Are college IT departments starting to write programs again?

I have been in the college game for more years than I want to admit. "Back in the day" (70's and 80's) college IT departments actually wrote programs do do things. Really! If you wanted to do anything on a computer you had to write the program. Most colleges were lucky to have a registration system that was written in house or by a computer science faculty member. In the 1980's we began to see the first integrated commercial systems. My first experience was with the Information Associates' SIS system. This was just for registration, records, admissions and financial aid. Development or programming began to die at around that time. In the later 80's HR and Finance became commercial products as well.

Fast forward to Y2K or year 2000. We all feared these legacy programs would die. We patched furiously with great fear that the end was near. It wasn't. We survived. Then came the web. Most us adopted ERP systems. The services were the same, but on the web. For five years this took every ounce of effort and talent to keep up and running. Years later only two companies are in the market - Sungards Banner product and Oracles Peoplesoft products.

The world may finally be changing again. Banner and PeopleSoft are the new legacy systems. Sorry guys, you have been long and faithful servants. We all use one or the other (yes, Datatel is in the space too but owned by SunGard). Enter WorkDay and SalesForce. The world of higher education is about to change again. I forgot to mention that for the last 5 years colleges have deployed dozens of third party niche systems. We did not build we bought. For those of you in the business, you know that this cannot continue. IT shops on college campuses are too small to manage a big ERP AND dozens niche products used all over campus from campus police to residential life to medical records to judicial affairs ... .

Back to WorkDay and SalesForce. Workday is a new player (created by Dave "the legend" Duffield). Mr. Duffield created PeopleSoft back in the 90's. This totally web architected cloud system is doing well in the HR and Financial Management space. Higher Ed has not been real interested because they have not had a student systems module. Rumor is this will change this summer (2013). Workday will get into the higher education space for real with the new student system. I will learn more about it at a meeting with Workday next week. This is exciting. A cloud system, developed for the cloud, by innovators who we know have what it takes. There are two big wins for higher education here. If we move to systems like this, much of the time spent on maintaining our ERP can be spent on development again. Imagine programmers programming!!

Next, the SalesForce Foundation offers an inexpensive way for colleges to reduce the number of niche apps they are running by creating home grown targeted apps on the SalesForce framework. Programmers get to program again. Colleges can reduce their inventory of third party apps, save annual maintenance costs on dozens of products, and become more self sustaining without adding lots of new staff. Better service to campus users, lower costs, and interesting work for programmers. Thank God we are headed back to the future. A few predictions for the next 5-10 years:

The current big players with still be around, but will not be growing customers.
College spending on bandwidth will jump, but costs will be recovered from reducing spending on campus data center infrastructure.
Data centers will shrink even more than they already have as colleges become more comfortable with having their data in the cloud
Colleges need to start developing again and reduce the number of third party apps they are now supporting. New development tools can enable this.
Development for the mobile device will never get traction because tools like SalesForce do this as you develop.

So what do ya think?

Next generation of ERP systems for colleges and universities

Our campus went live with the PeoleSoft (now Oracle) suite of products in 2003 and 2004. Like most campuses we had our bumps early on. After all, ERP systems change the culture, not just the technology. As we sit in 2012, I have to wonder what will come next for College data management systems will look like. The current systems, although only few years old, are already old looking and their functionality does not satisfy new and growing needs of campuses. If current leaders in this market space don't adapt, I think we will see new players, soon.

Here are a few things that I think need to be in the next generation of ERP systems:

1. The ability to customize the look and feel of pages needs to be building. Now, adding branding, chaginging fonts and the location of data boxes is hard or not possible. This makes the current systems look almost "legacy" like when compared to other interactive web sites. Campus portals for example, should be able to be consistent with the universtiy brand and "moderized" as needed, without effecting functionality.

2. Mobile is here and is not going away. Just as campuses need to develop a strategy for presenting their image on mobile devices, ERP providers need to format pages for mobile devices. It is early in the game, but pushing this task off to third party vendors adds to campus expense. Since we know that mobile will not go away, vendors should have plans to build this into to the base product. BTW, I do not think that all of the ERP functionality needs to be in mobile format. Starting with the parts of the system that students and faculty deal with would be great. Back office staff will likely continue to do their work in the back office.

3. Security needs to be easier to manage. For the past several years we have had to dedicate almost one entire FTE to managing security and provisioning. We have since automated this process ourselves and reduce this time to about 10% of an FTE. It can be done.

4. Reduce the anumber of third party tools that are needed for reporting, refunding, electronic payments, eTranscripts, admissions applications, judical management .... . The list goes on. These are all areas where many campuses are using third party solutions with, again, more cost for products, integration isses and personnel costs. Not all functionality can be built in, but if someone can build a product with most of this, they will be the new leader in the market.

5. Build in things like a work order system (in Financials), an event room scheduling system, and maybe even HR contract automation. This would be real "value add". Again, the new leader will have most of these.

6. Lastly, think hard about a cloud solution. Data centers are expensive to run and staff. Many small or medium size colleges would probably like to phase out most of their data center activity over the next 5-10 years. It has to be affordable, secure, and with great service levels and tools.

Off the soap box for awhile. The College ERP market is getting dated fast. This is a problem, but a great opportunity for the next big thing. Check out WorkDay for a glimpse of the future. They work only with HR and Finance, but the model is here.