Techwire had a conversation with Patrick Perry, the CIO of the California State University system, and here is the exchange. It has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Techwire: What’s the relationship between the CSU system as an entity and its campuses?
Patrick Perry: I work here at the Chancellor’s Office, which is the headquarters of the system. There’s 23 CSU campuses, and we are the largest four-year public sector in the United States. The campuses themselves, they have their own technology shops there. Here at the Chancellor’s Office, I deliver a number of centrally delivered technology services on behalf of the campuses. Here, centrally, we run the centralized ERP system which is PeopleSoft, we’re running finance, HR and the student system. We also centrally procure and install all the networking equipment and security hardware, like gateways and border equipment, for the campuses. They’re all using the same product there.
TW: PeopleSoft is for all the campuses?
PP: All of them except one. San Diego State is still on a legacy system.
TW: Tell us about the Learning Management Systems across the CSU.
PP: Each campus is responsible for its own LMS. We have some cooperative purchasing agreements for the LMS’s that are in use in the system. It seems like we’re primarily using four LMS’s: Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and I think we have one campus that’s on Desire 2 Learn. For the campuses that want to go in and get the best deal that they can and get centralized support, we’ve got a purchasing arrangement through procurement here that allows them to go in on a pre-arranged pricing schedule for each of those.
TW: What does the CSU IT budget look like?
PP: I know what my budget here is for central IT. It’s right around $100 million a year, and a lot of that is licensing of Oracle products, the networking equipment, my programming staff that runs the ERP, business intelligence. Things like that.
TW: What kinds of IT projects is the CSU looking at over the next six months and 12 months?
PP: We’re currently in the middle of a few things. We are currently doing an upgrade to the PeopleSoft product suite from version 9.0 to 9.2, in all HR, finance and student areas. That’s going to take a few years, we’re having to chunk it up a couple of campuses at a time because a lot of them have written custom mods and things like that, so we do that in waves.
We just recently did a bid for wireless equipment for all the campuses. We will be doing wireless installations for all 23 campuses over the next few years, but the bid is in its final stages of being concluded. We’ve got another bid that’s out, about in the same stage, for log management services.
We are in the early stages of looking at what kind of cloud services we want to procure or manage on behalf of all the campuses. We’ve been talking to all the major cloud providers, so we want to potentially come up with something there. We haven’t quite determined it yet.
We are in the midst of creating a data lake, centralizing all the data that floats around in the ERP and the facilities, the finance data, the academic planning data. Basically getting it all in one location and building a semantic layer on top of it and getting it back out to the campuses.
The other thing we are in the early stages of exploring is what kind of integration layer we’re going to be building around the PeopleSoft. Campuses and centrally here, there are a lot of other products that are in use. A lot of them are selected by the campuses, some of them are selected centrally but things like the library management system, parking systems, card key access, all these things have to integrate in with the ERP system eventually. Instead of doing a lot of custom mods to integrate these things, we’re going to start looking at potentially getting some kind of integration product that sits on top of PeopleSoft that becomes a standard for all the other products that we integrate.
Right now it’s kind of the Wild West, and everyone is doing an integration one-off with these products, and it’s pretty laborious.
TW: Will the data lake be hosted on the cloud?
PP: My guess is it’s going to start on premise, and as usage grows, we’re going to have to monitor that to see whether that’s something we continue to host here on premise or whether we actually need to move it to the cloud. My guess is we’re not going to start that project on the cloud, but as time goes on, we may end up having to do that.
TW: What are the timelines for cloud services and the data lake?
PP: Probably in the next year or two. We have a couple of campuses already that are actively moving a lot of their IT operations into the cloud. CSU Monterey Bay has done a lot of that. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recently signed a deal with Amazon that is going to move all of their stuff from the data center into the cloud so they don’t have to build a new data center. Campuses are getting to migration points and we really want to assist them in that migration by finding the best cloud solutions for them and managing it centrally too.
TW: What kind of security requirements are involved?
PP: It has yet to be determined. That’s part of the exploration.
TW: What challenges has the CSU faced in rolling these projects out?
PP: Some of the challenges are, 23 campuses have 23 different ways of doing things. They’re not always standardized, even within our PeopleSoft system. It’s really 23 individual iterations of PeopleSoft. They’ve done custom mods in their own areas and we don’t necessarily have one standard for everything, so when rolling things out, we have struggled with the non-standard ERP across the campuses and dealing with their individual cultures. We also have an issue with technology equity within the campuses. We’ve got some campuses that are large campuses and they're well-funded and have big IT shops. Then we have tiny campuses and they don’t have the resources to do the things we need them to do.
TW: What’s the pie-in-the-sky dream for the CSU?
PP: We don’t necessarily want to standardize the experience from campus to campus. We’re not trying to make everyone completely, exactly the same. We do want to facilitate the seamless transition of students as they move into the system and out of the system. We want them to be able to self-serve more of their educational plans and experiences. So building good mobile apps and being able to map out your majors; ultimately, we wish to improve our graduation rates.
TW: What if you had unlimited resources?
PP: We would just have a fantastic student experience from the moment that they came to CSU. They would be well-served, they would have access to anything they needed to help them get through, they would have really good instructional materials. They would be able to transfer their credits around seamlessly. It can get pretty deep: They would know where there is an available parking spot. They would have wireless in the parking lot. They would have virtual reality environments in the classroom.
