Mark Mara, associate director of Administrative Systems and Distributed Technologies at Cornell, answers audience members' questions during his talk Jan. 13 on the technical architecture of the new administration software systems. Denise Weldon/University Photography
The devil is in the details.
We've all heard how new software from PeopleSoft will streamline the university administration, save time, cut costs and improve service to students. Finally we're beginning to hear about what a headache it's going to be for Cornell's technical people to make all this happen.
Mark Mara, associate director of Administrative Systems and Distributed Technologies for Cornell Information Technologies, described the process as "treadmills of opportunity" in a talk to network administrators, department heads and other interested parties Jan. 13 in Kennedy Auditorium. Mara is reponsible for the technical architecture of administrative systems at Cornell, meaning that his job is to be sure all our computer systems can work together. Right now that job includes ensuring that the new PeopleSoft software fits in with what's already here.
Skillfully translating technical jargon for non-techies in the audience, Mara gave an overview of what has to be done to get the new software working and what everyone else at Cornell will have to do to use it.
Cornell already has spent about two years evaluating "beta," or test, versions of the software and in some cases helping redesign it.
"PeopleSoft didn't listen to us too well in the beginning, but they do now," Mara said.
The latest full release of the human resources and payroll portions of the PeopleSoft system was delivered here in September. The first full release of the student administration portion was delivered in December. They are part of what PeopleSoft calls Version 7 of its product.
Some 75 to 80 of Cornell's techies will now spend about a year on "implementation," in other words, more testing, with dummy data. The human resources and payroll software actually will be put into use the third week in September 1998. That time was chosen so that the surge of student hiring that goes on at the beginning of a semester would be mostly finished. The student administration software will go online at the beginning of 1999.
One reason for the delays, besides testing, is that Cornell will have to rewrite some portions of the software to fit its special needs. That's done as little as possible because, Mara said, "Every time we make a modification to PeopleSoft, we have to carry that modification forward into the next release." And, he said, there's a new release about once a year, so "we're always going to be a little behind."
Cornell also will have to write a few new programs, called "clients," to access the PeopleSoft system. Like Bear Access and other systems Cornellians already are using, this new administrative software uses a "client-server" structure. That means that most of the data processing is done on a large central computer -- the server -- while your desktop computer -- the client -- just collects the results and displays them to you.
PeopleSoft supplies a client for its system that runs on a Windows 95 computer. It's a great client, Mara said, except for one little problem: "When I install it on your workstation, your workstation breaks." What he means by that, he quickly adds, is that users may have a problem running other software on their computers along with the PeopleSoft client. "We can make it work, but it may take 5 to 10 hours for each user," Mara said. An alternative, he said, is to run the PeopleSoft client on a "dedicated" computer that isn't running any other software. Fortunately, he said, only about 50 people on campus will need access to the full PeopleSoft system.
But Cornell also will have hundreds of "casual" users who need to get at parts of the data. Most of them will use another PeopleSoft program that allows them to access parts of the database via a web browser, but in some cases Cornell programmers will have to write special clients for particular purposes.
Finally, all 20,000 or so Cornell users will utilize simple programs like Just the Facts or CourseEnroll that pull out small bits of information, and those will have to be updated to work with the new system. And with so many users, sophisticated security features must be added.
"The PeopleSoft software is a work in progress," Mara explained.
The new client programs will be written in a computer language called Java, which is "platform-independent," meaning that the same program will run on a PC or Mac. Eventually PeopleSoft will supply prewritten chunks of Java code, whimsically called "Java Beans," that our programmers will be able to drop into these programs, Mara said.
One catch: Older computers won't run Java applications. Staff members who need regular access to the PeopleSoft system will need a PC with at least a 133Mhz processor and 32MB of RAM, running Windows 95 or better or Windows NT, or a Power Mac with at least 32MB of RAM and Mac OS 8. For the rest of us, any computer that runs a web browser will probably do the job.
Once the human resources, payroll and student administration systems are in place, other systems will follow: the student financial and advising in July 1999; flexible benefits in November 1999; alumni affairs in late 1999 or early 2000; and housing some time in 2000.
And you thought you had a long wait to get your phone installed.
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