UW: From Frying Pan to Fire?

The UW system announced that it will formally declare $26 MILLION "flushed down the toilet" and scrap its Lawson software-based payroll project.

THEN they announced that they were going to Oracle's Peoplesoft solution.

But maybe it is not a solution:

The 11-campus North Dakota University System (NDUS) continues to work on a troubled rollout of PeopleSoft ERP and academic software that critics said has exceeded budget and missed deadlines.

The Web-based system, based on Oracle Corp.'s PeopleSoft Enterprise 8 software, is known as ConnectND and handles academic tasks such as grant and contracts management as well as payroll and human resources functions.

The effort to date was described as "a train wreck" by Gerald Groenewold, director of the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental Research Center, which develops energy-efficient and environmental technologies. The nonprofit group, based on the Grand Forks campus, relies on ConnectND for its operations.

"The old systems had Band-Aids, but they worked," he said. "Just give me something that works. [ConnectND] has cost our organization a phenomenal amount of money to try and implement."

The financials software is at times unable to quickly provide account balances to customers -- a task that once took minutes now can take weeks, said Groenewold. So far, the installation has cost his organization about $500,000 and still costs about $15,000 a month. "To say I'm frustrated would be a significant understatement," he said.

As we all know, however, Oracle IS a solution--for BagManJim.