Now that the ASMP/Workday migration project is about to be rebooted following what can only be characterized as a failure, maybe it’s time to look at just what went wrong.

First of all, we can’t assign any blame to the people working on the implementation and migration. Clearly a lot of hard work by competent people has been expended, without a lot to show for it.

The problems have their roots before the beginning of the project. The motivations for doing it were never clear, or at least never clearly expressed. Who actually wanted it, and why? How was it supposed to improve the University? What deficiencies in what we already had was it supposed to improve on? If these questions were ever asked, let alone answered, I missed it somehow. Just saying “modernize” doesn’t really express or answer them.

What we’ve lacked, for over fifteen years now, is a vision of how information technologies can make the University better. No one at the higher levels of leadership seems to have grappled with questions like “Why do we have IT?” or “What should we be accomplishing with IT?” or “Are there any strategic advantages we could derive from IT?” At least if they have, they haven’t communicated any answers they’ve come up with.

Until we have a vision of what we want to do, that’s clearly communicated to everyone affected, we’ll likely see more debacles like this.