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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ is currently on a technology model where each administrative area has its own "best of breed" software application. After careful consideration of our options and a review of the models available to us, we have made the decision to move our administrative operations into what is called an Enterprise model. Essentially, this means each of these administrative offices will all be using one single system to manage all their data instead of many different systems.

But why are we doing this? 

Older systems, like many of those we currently use, are often inefficient and hard to maintain even when they're in prime condition. We've made a lot of changes, called customizations, to these systems over the years, which makes them even less efficient and harder to maintain. In our case, these older systems operate more like a series of Excel workbooks that you can make look at each other to help manage your operations. This is a fairly limited way to operate in an increasingly inter-connected and data-hungry world.

And since we're using a lot of these different systems, but all sorts of people need to have access to the information stored in these different systems, moving the information back and forth is a lot of work (and isn't ideal from a data security perspective). Our poor Data Bus is constantly having to drive back and forth between the triangle system and the rectangle system, with a necessary stop at the circle system along the way. And to get to the octagon, it needs to don a snorkel and go basically underwater, which is a lot of work for a bus. This is why sometimes changes you've made don't show up immediately -- the information lives in more than one system, and it takes resources to get that data into the next system.

Eventually, it became clear that the best thing for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ was to move everyone into a single, modern system for offices to manage their data. This removes a lot of the obstacles mentioned above while providing the advantages of having all users and data working together in a single system. And, because technology has changed so much even just in the last few years, newer systems work in a much more intuitive and flexible way than how our older legacy systems worked.

Enter the Enterprise Resource Planning System known as Workday.

An Enterprise Resource Planning System, or an ERP or Enterprise System for short, are integrated organization management software systems. Workday is one of these Enterprise systems, and it means that instead of the college's data living in all sorts of different systems, it will all live together in one single place.

What kinds of information do we mean when we say ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾'s Human Resources, Financial, and Student data? A lot of it! And all of it will be working together in one single, unified space. 

A few examples of what you'll see and experience in Workday:

This makes our systems and data easier to support and work in, and this in turn makes a much better and smoother experience for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾'s students, faculty, and staff. 

You should expect for there to be plenty of changes in store as we journey together towards our expanded use of Workday! ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ used to have a different system for requesting time off before Workday, and people had to submit expense reports differently before Workday, too. Those are two small examples of how ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ changed our processes to make them fit Workday's methodology, or the way Workday is set up to manage certain tasks. On the whole, we've seen a lot of improvements come our way already as a community because of the work we've already done with Workday.  

Admittedly, it's hard to say, specifically, what will change for you once we roll out Workday to the campus, because the ways Workday works for each campus can vary. As we move through this process, the Alchemy and ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ teams will be working together to make good choices about how ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ takes advantage of the Workday methodology. But here are a few things we know about how Workday will work differently than many of the tools we have now.

A lot of our current tools have been very heavily customized by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾, or even specifically built by IT at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾, to be able to give us a lot of specialized processes. Like a hotel omelette bar.

But with Workday's Power of One model, as with really any more modern system, being hosted in the cloud means our developers and engineers don't have access to the background code for these systems like they used to. This is done, in part, to ensure that all clients across the business are all running the same version of the software at the same time, which makes it much easier for the vendor to provide support and updates to all their clients across the board. It also makes it much easier for users across industries to work together and learn from each other, because every user is on the same version.

Modern cloud-hosted systems will allow users to configure them, much like you might think about how you would configure your options for a brand new car:

This is confusing, because most people would consider ordering a car to be customizing. But it's not! It's configuring - there are a handful of options to choose from, which are decided by the car maker (or the software vendor in our case) that, in the end, give you a product that is made to your specifications with some certain limitations.

This is distinct from what it means to truly customize, where the owner is at liberty to make or change whatever they want to:

But, as detailed above, we can't sustain that kind of environment at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ any longer. For starters, it isn't how the modern software market operates. But, in addition to that, it is extremely expensive and labor intensive to maintain a highly customized environment, and those customizations over time make environments hard to maintain and keep secure.

Because we'll be moving from a highly customized environment to one that is configurable, we are going to have to do some soul searching about the types of changes we make to move to Workday. We'll have to examine which of our processes or ideas deliver truly unique and distinct value to a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ education, meaning they are worth the time and energy it will take to make Workday duplicate that result, and which other things that we might think of as high value that could be done differently without sacrificing quality.

So while we can't tell you exactly how things will change as we transition to Workday, we know that things will change, and hopefully this provides some guidance as to why.