One casualty in the final days of California’s budget negotiations this year was $150 million in funding for a pair of enterprise IT projects at California Community Colleges (CCC) that have been years in the making.
Those two projects, the Collaborative Enterprise Resource Planning Project and the Common Cloud Data Platform Demonstration Project, were set to receive $162.5 million until the governor and Legislature reached a budget deal in June.
In the final deal, the system received just $12 million for Common Cloud, according to Chris Ferguson, CCC’s executive vice chancellor of finance and strategic initiatives. The projects made up two of the three prongs of CCC’s Combined Statewide Technology Platform Efforts.
Common Cloud seeks to create infrastructure and data governance principles to allow for data sharing across the CCC system, with an emphasis on security, student support and specific reporting requirements. Those data reports experience “significant issues and delays,” according to the CCC website.
“These decades-old processes no longer meet the needs of our students or colleges,” a project description reads.
By making data available to the Chancellor’s Office in near real time, CCC hopes to better support student success by more rapidly identifying trends in enrollment and other metrics. It could also lead to an “automatic application and acceptance pipeline to other institutions.”
The ERP project, meanwhile, sought to create a common ERP system for use across CCC, which includes 116 colleges. A study from Accenture found that those colleges primarily used three ERP systems — Colleague, Banner and PeopleSoft — with a handful using “home-grown” systems.
However, Accenture found that the various colleges’ systems were at differing levels of maturity and were “outdated and highly customized platforms.” That creates manual work and makes it hard for students to work with disparate systems and limits the ability of students, faculty and staff to share best practices. The study also found that CCC could save millions of dollars moving to common systems.
The two projects date back to 2019, when CCC Cohort Information Systems crafted a case study exploring the idea of moving to a shared cloud solution.
As the governor and Legislature wrangled the budget this year they had to contend with a $12 billion deficit. The final negotiations included cuts, reserve fund usage and major changes to the California Environmental Quality Act.
