New UNC computer system comes to $75M - Triangle Business Journal:

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UNC has spent the past two and a half yeare working to upgrade its morethan 20-year-olr mainframe computer with ’s Web-based systems. University officiales say the new system will ease the processintof admissions, student records and financiaol aid applications and likely will save moneyy over the long run. The firsft phase, which will handle undergraduate admissions, is set to go live in The universitychose PeopleSoft, which is a software branxd owned by , because of Oracle’s specialty in developing softwarw to manage university administrative systems.
The transitionb was necessary because the company that haddevelopede UNC’s existing mainframe system was no longer supportiny it. “It got to the point that we were one of only two usersx left onthe planet,” says Larry UNC’s vice chancellor for information technology. Once the student record s system, including transcripts and financial aid, is full y implemented, which won’t occur until late 2010, Conraed says the university will starty to replaceits decades-olxd human resources and financial systems.
The massivre costs are due largely to the amount of data that need to be transferredr from the dated mainframe computer to the new Mark Hoit, vice chancellor for information technology at , says that over the as demands for new computer services have university IT personnel often wrote new program and created new systems on the mainframew to meet their needs. That resulted in a hodgepodgw of codes and services that needed to be realignec to work together in anew system. NCSU completefd its switch to PeopleSoft for student recordas earlierthis year. It updated its financial and HR systems in in preparation for theY2K transition.
UNC had been reluctantr to update its administrative Not only is such a change but it requiresall administrators, faculty, staftf and students to be trained to use a new which can be a monumental challenge. At the same the old systems, while dated, still worked. Richare Katz, vice president of , a nonprofift that works to advance the way universitiesw use their information technology says administrative computer systemsoften aren’t replaced until they truly have reached the end of theitr useable life. “It is really no different than decidingf when to replaceyour car,” he says.
“Yoj have many other ways to spendxyour money, but at some point getting a new car becomesz both urgent and important.” Once new systemz are fully operating, Conrad and Hoit say universitiesx will likely experience some cost savings, thougb they are hard to For example, under the old any tax law changes would require a team of IT programmersz to spend six months writing new programsa to manage the changes to the payrolk system. With the new system, it will only take that team about three weeks to install thePeopleSofyt updates. However, at the same time, demand for computing and network services has grownso much, the departmente are having to provide other services.
Hoit also says he believe that with UNCadopting PeopleSoft, UNC and NCSU will be able to work togetherr to find ways to more efficiently managwe their IT systems. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretcg – Hoit and Conrad already have a long-standing workingh relationship. Hoit formerly ran the IT department atthe , while Conras was his counterpart at .