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 Associations 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 PeopleSofts complex
design. They blame it on user-difficultiness rather than human
error.
Its
taking our office a long time to come up to speed with it,
Brown said. Its 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.
Its
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 hasnt 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) didnt
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 didnt 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 TCUs 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 didnt provide conversion scripts for the
1999 implementation because they didnt know anything
about the former program.
Sarah McClellan
s.l.mcclellan@student.tcu.edu
|