The hurdles Stanford and other universities face with the new ERP system are largely cultural ones. For instance, lean staffs and tight budgets at most university campuses usually lead to a lack of proper training and systems testing. At Stanford, Livingston says that plenty of training was offered, but many users didn't take it. He has set up new training programs, including a group who sits side by side with users to help them learn how to do certain complex tasks; periodic user group meetings; website and e-mail lists that offer more help; and expert users embedded in the various departments who aid their colleagues.

Stanford's IT was still struggling with integrating the enterprise systems when the newly launched PeopleSoft Web portal (called Axess) crashed last fall. Like the new UMass portal, Axess couldn't handle the load of all the returning students trying to log in to the untested Web-based system at the same time, Livingston says. Stanford was able to fix those problems relatively quickly, but Livingston and his staff continue to struggle with the enterprise projects. The university's departments remain "highly suspicious and resistant" of his efforts to standardize and centralize business processes, Livingston says.

Overloaded at Umass
At the University of Massachusetts, IT hoped to originally have the Web portal rollout installed by March 2004. Delays in testing the Spire system, however, forced them up against an immovable deadline: the return of 24,000 students to campus over Labor Day weekend.

By midday Tuesday, after some periods of slowness, "the system choked," says John Dubach, CIO at UMass-Amherst. It stayed down for a long four days at the most crucial time of the year—when students needed to add or drop classes and find out where their classes were on campus.

Dubach would later realize that his staff did not do enough load testing on Spire. A configuration problem with the password system also reared its ugly head. An explanatory e-mail had been sent out to the students, informing them of the password requirements in the new system. It turns out no one read the e-mail, and therefore, students flooded the "I forgot my password" option because they couldn't log in. After about a thousand of these requests, the system buckled. "We didn't test for a thousand password requests," Dubach says.

The opening day nightmare was compounded by the fact that PeopleSoft seemed unable to help. "We were looking for help left and right," Dubach says. "PeopleSoft had suggestions but no solutions to anything. They hadn't had that much experience with the portal in this type of environment."