Wednesday, October 3, 2001

PeopleSoft not people friendly, some university officials say
By Sarah McClellan
Staff Reporter

Entering the wrong query into PeopleSoft caused the admissions office to overestimate the number of freshman minorities to enroll in Fall 2001, said Ray Brown, dean of admissions.

Another error occurred in Spring 2001 when $40,000 was mistakenly put into the Student Government Association’s account because the yearbook payments were given the same code as SGA fees, said controller Cheryl Wilson.

Administrators say these errors are a result of PeopleSoft’s complex design. They blame it on user-difficultiness rather than human error.

“It’s taking our office a long time to come up to speed with it,” Brown said. “It’s not as easy (to use) as some other programs out there.”

The university began using the PeopleSoft program for its admissions, student financial, and human resource records in 1999 because the old software, Information Associates, was not Y2K compliant, said Dave Edmondson, assistant provost for information services.

Leo Munson, associate vice chancellor for academic support, said one of the main difficulties with PeopleSoft is entering queries or requests for particular sets of information.

“The software itself is hard to conceptualize,” Munson said. “But basically, if a piece of information gets in the wrong table and you ask a query, you get the wrong answer.”

Jim Littlefield, director of product marketing for PeopleTools and technology for PeopleSoft, said the request must be asked properly for a query to work.

“It’s how you ask the question,” Littlefield said. “In designing a query, you get different answers depending on how you ask the question.”

Michael TenEyck, manager of administrative systems at TCU, said employees take “query classes,” which helps teach users to put together complex reports.

“The person putting in the query has to be smart enough to get it all together,” TenEyck said.

TenEyck said if a faculty or staff member needs to make a complex query and hasn’t taken the class yet, there is a liaison or, “power user,” in each department to help.

Coding data correctly is also an issue, Munson said.

“All numbers have to be coded correctly for anything to be right,” Munson said. “The access of information is not easy.”

Lisa Sion, public relations manager for education and government for PeopleSoft would not comment about complaints the program is difficult for users to understand.

She also would not comment about whether the program has a check mechanism for identifying errors.

Mike Scott, director of scholarships and student financial aid, said he does not think PeopleSoft is a difficult program.

“I firmly believe PeopleSoft is easier to use than our old system, but it was difficult to adapt to something new,” Scott said.

Scott said the ability to get data out of the PeopleSoft system is better than the old system because you can get an answer to “virtually any question you want to know.”

“What PeopleSoft has done is enable computer users to get data for themselves rather than relying on a computer services person,” Scott said.

Adriana Farella, director of product planning for PeopleSoft, said she thinks the product is easier to use than old systems.

“(PeopleSoft) might give areas of functionality that (a university) didn’t have before,” Farella said.

However, admissions office staff members, as well as other campus offices, went through extensive training to use PeopleSoft, Brown said.

“Originally, we started training just a couple of people in the office with the idea that they would train the rest of us,” Brown said. “That didn’t work.”

Sion said PeopleSoft has roughly 610 higher education customers across the nation.

Cleveland State University implemented PeopleSoft in 1999, as reported in the Cleveland Stater.

According to a Nov. 24, 1999 article, CSU had problems with the implementation, mainly in the financial aid office.

Nathan Sheeren, former reporter and editor in chief for the Cleveland Stater, said financial aid problems caused students to be dropped from classes and charged late fees.

The Cleveland State University Board of Trustees contemplated suing PeopleSoft for the problems, but instead decided to “demand immediate assistance from the PeopleSoft company,” according to another article published on Nov. 24, 1999.

Edmondson said TCU’s two-year conversion to the system was fast, Y2K made a longer conversion impossible.

“In our haste we made some errors,” Edmondson said.

TenEyck said one of the reasons for the change was because systems like Information Associates are so old it is hard to fix them. He said another reason to use PeopleSoft is because TCU wants to take advantage of the Internet. FrogNet is an example of what TCU has already done with PeopleSoft and the Internet.

Farella said TCU is going to upgrade to PeopleSoft 8, which is easier to use because it is completely Internet based.

Edmondson said he anticipates fewer problems with the installation of the new version because they will provide conversion scripts, programs needed to convert data from one format to another.

He said PeopleSoft didn’t provide conversion scripts for the 1999 implementation because they didn’t know anything about the former program.

Sarah McClellan
s.l.mcclellan@student.tcu.edu