Successful, yet different, journeys to the Oracle Cloud in Higher Education

Increasingly we seem to hear, “it’s not a matter of if — but a matter of when” an organization will move to the cloud. Given the inevitability, it should be comforting to know there are many ways of successfully getting there. The journey to the cloud is different for every institution - some jump into the transformation completely while others dip their toes — and that’s OK. The important thing to remember, regardless of the scope of your cloud transformation, is that it is an opportunity — an opportunity to shed legacy thinking, to unify and redesign process, and most of all, to expect new and better outcomes.

During a recent panel discussion at Alliance Virtual 2021, a conference for Higher Education User Group (HEUG) members, human resource information system (HRIS) professionals discussed their respective universities’ paths to the Oracle Cloud platform. Jeff Haynes, Baker Tilly director of enterprise solutions and services, moderated the discussion among Cindy Martin, Stanford University’s HRIS director, Tom Drazic, Creighton University’s HRIS director and Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University’s chief information officer.

Hybrid

For Stanford’s Martin, a new talent management application was the impetus. The institution had three populations, one on a highly customized version of PeopleSoft ePerform, one on Taleo Talent Management, and another using a manual paper-based process. The irregularities caused by customization, the end of life of Taleo Talent Management and the inefficiencies of paper made for a less than optimal solution. The school had been using PeopleSoft for its core HR for years, and saw no need to change at the time. As Martin said, the system is “our finely tailored old suit,” fitted to the institution’s needs and still in good working order. Instead, Stanford focused on finding a new performance management system.

Stanford uses Oracle products on a number of fronts, so they were already familiar with Oracle systems.  Martin and her team looked at products by other vendors to see if there was other functionality they couldn’t live without that wasn’t in Oracle HCM Cloud. Next, they mapped out what they thought they needed and had a demo of HCM Cloud and realized it met most of their requirements. Choosing Oracle HCM Cloud for talent management meant that HRIS and IT would have to work closely with Baker Tilly to build an integration to the PeopleSoft core. Additionally, Stanford’s Talent Management team had to engage multiple stakeholders, develop a common model unifying disparate practices and gain initial acceptance for the change in both process and tool.