Alliance
2012 has come to a conclusion. What strikes me about every Alliance
conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across
higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle
PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions). In addition to the vibrant U.S.
organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance
again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups
in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K. Their first meeting is
planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount
of interest and attendance.
In
my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance
there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's
commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of
perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to
explain why I believe this to be true.
First
let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in
two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty
that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees
of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use
the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed
all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead
product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing.
The
second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of
applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software
assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of
middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more
significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case
today. This is also perceived as lack of investment.
Let
me address these two points. First the UI. More is being done here
than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at
Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether
it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but
very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca
acquisition (see some cool
examples here)
there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue. There are also some
amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will
eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they
had an impressive setup at Alliance. Hopefully many of you that attended
found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be
a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council
meeting in Washington in June.
In
the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also
an area of focus for the company and my team. We're making this a
priority especially in the areas of identity management and security,
leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging,
and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic
Suite as our platform for
SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP),
and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on
OBI applications.
But
at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education
user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that
help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better
integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.
It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between
customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe.
And
I can't avoid mentioning that this kind
of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that
can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional
excellence (which starts with IT) and student success. It's not (in my
opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only
increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus
on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.
While
I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review
article (Information
Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take
strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the
opposite of long-term stability...." Sure there has been healthy,
creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of,
in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation
and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and
develop integrated solutions.
Cole
