I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind
HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East
and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman
University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates
attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi
Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar.
There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place
(in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in
the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an
accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch
their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the
prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle
solutions in the region. In particular
the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics
and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their
capabilities.
Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I
attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their
implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the
use by Qatar University E-business Suite
for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter
presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s
requirements.
In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th
meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in
Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around
our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud
approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some
cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and
extensibility in the software (versus customization).
On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to
Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include
significant participation from council members in the form of panel
discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John
Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales
(Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion.
I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to
me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed
on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software
upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all
this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise
software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional,
flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these
solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in
the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real
objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial
software industry. Again, when
commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization,
and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions
(relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the
massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke
community source system. In this era of
cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching,
learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue
to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the
adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts
and expended resources.
The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher
Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech
Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I
almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements
made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election
campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin
to snake oil. He goes on to state that
while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the
necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right.
This is exactly what
ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running
on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the
data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data
into useable information. I’ll grant Mr.
Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving
student success in higher education are classic big data problems that
data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a
massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the
pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many
many other problems across multiple industries.
