superflippy's Journal: One ERP to Rule Them All

The University where I work has just announced a major IT initiative. It sounds like the plan is to buy a commercial ERP system to replace all the software from various vendors and homegrown systems the University has been using to manage its information so far.

I've helped create some of those homegrown systems, so I may be a little biased, but this sounds like a disaster in the making. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have a couple of consultants determine which of the software we're already using people like best and then make that the standard? I'm a little concerned about how well a top-down mega-system implementation is going to go over.

Information sharing is important, and it sounds like that's a major consideration in the ERP plan. But it's been my experience that information can be shared between disparate systems if people are willing to share it (the politics of info sharing is more difficult than the technology).

Maybe I've heard too many news stories of major software implementations gone wrong. Anyone have any stories of something like this going well and saving the company/university thousands of dollars?

Infinite Campus

[allism]

The school system my husband works for is evaluating a software package called Infinite Campus. At the demo for IC (pronounced ick?) the rep kept having to take notes regarding all the bugs that were cropping up - and this is not beta software, apparently several schools are already using this package.

I hope your experience is less buggy ;)

Re:Infinite Campus

[superflippy]

Thanks for the heads-up on IC. I haven't heard what software they're going to be using - hopefully nobody's made that decision yet because they claim to just be beginning the "gather business requirements" phase. All I know is that Bearing Point [bearingpoint.com] is somehow involved.

I feel bad for being so suspicious about this, but the technical issues that cropped up during the merger of the College of Liberal arts with the College of Science and Math made a cynic out of me.