Project Emerge should retreat, says reader

Response to the piece of “Digital era emerges on campus’ which appeared on 29 March 2007.

“This week U of C IT department’s Project Emerge wraps up its $30-million initiative that has affected the way every student, faculty and administrative staff member goes about their business on campus.”

How true, but how horrible the experience!  Yet, there is a real disconnect—some are celebrating (i.e. THEM); most of us are not nor will we likely to be.

Mike McAdam (VP Finance—the person who bought the system) says that this system has resulted in the “…streamlining the University’s business processes and more effectively utilizing administrative resources”.

The admin resources might now be more ‘effective’ (but I doubt it-look at the turnover rate in Trust Accounting) but the vast majority of the academic and support staff would I suspect disagree. Mention PeopleSoft to the ‘rank and file’ and eyes will roll. Classical conditioning? Possibly, but more likely fear-conditioning!

If PeopleSoft is ‘…part of a strong U of C experience’ (quote attributed to Mike McAdam) then boy are we in big trouble.

By now most of us have had our fair share of what one of my colleagues calls ‘being banished to digital hell’ experiences dealing with PeopleSoft (e.g. in using it to access our research grants, etc). It has been close to 2 years since the inauguration of the system and most of us are still attempting to successfully navigate through its intricacies. Most interesting is that the system does not seem to improve with age! I wish to make only 2 further points here:

1) I entered scores for the Open Scholarship Competition (Faculty of Graduate Studies) last week using the ‘new’ system. I was pleasantly surprised. It sort of worked. It’s still not very intuitive and the system does not appear to be set up to ‘remember’ what you just did. However, since I had envisioned a real horror show, I was pleasantly surprised.

2) However, as regards PeopleSoft for getting money off of a grant (etc.), the system is absolutely horrible. I wonder if the amount of lost productivity by all staff dwarfs the $30 million dollars that the University spent on the system? I know of many who have spent many hours attempting to get the system to work. It is not easy to do. I need not go through all the dumb things one has to do to get the system to be functionally relevant. One example. Shouldn’t the system by now know that I’m in Calgary? After all I’ve been using it since its inception and I have never ever told it I was at another University or in another City. Suffice to say that the system is not in any way ‘user-friendly’ or intuitive. The most charitable thing I can say about the PeopleSoft system we purchased it that it is still a struggle. I have often wondered if we would have ever received this system if we actually had to use it to purchase the system?

While it is true that one can ‘access the system on a 24/7 basis’ (but not always); if all you can do is to access something that does not work well what is so good about that?

Anyway, That’s my 2 cents. It’s a bad system, it’s not intuitive, and it costs all of us all lots of valuable time.

Finally, my dad is 87, never ever had a computer. I bought him one last year, got him on-line and guess what? He learned within 10 min how to make a successful purchase off of Amazon, then successfully moved on to the Ashton-Green on-line catalogue, and then made it big time to the iTunes Store. All of those systems are intuitive, they remember who you are, where you are and keep the necessary credit card information (etc.) confidential. I don’t understand why our 30-million dollar system just does not work like one of these. I’m certain someone could have even reversed engineered one of those systems for a lot less than 30 million!

Regards (but not to PeopleSoft)

Ken Lukowiak,
Faculty of Medicine