2001, he came with both
institutional knowledge and
plenty of IT experience. He
was a graduate of CUNY and
had spent four years as chief
information officer for the
City of New York. Dobrin
quickly realized that CUNY’s
IT systems were as diverse as
its academic programs, but
without the depth and coherence. They were a collection
of mostly homegrown applications cobbled together over
the course of three decades.
In some cases, the handful of
people who understood them
were no longer employed at
CUNY. In other cases, there
was plenty of institutional
knowledge, but the programs
were written in obsolete
code. Most had been developed by the IT department, with
little input from the business units that the applications were
intended to serve.
Had it been subject to grading, the IT system would
have flunked all but the most forgiving tests. On a day-to-day basis, it was failing to serve the needs of both CUNY’s
diverse student body and the 37,000 employees who keep
CUNY’s academic and complex administrative machinery
humming. At a higher level, the IT system was not contributing to CUNY’s academic commitment to push the frontiers
of learning, and it did little to enhance CUNY’s presence in
the community. Most sizable universities play an integral
role in the intellectual life of their communities. This is
especially true of CUNY, with its many outreach programs
and a student body that spans virtually every demographic
of New York City’s vibrantly diverse population. The IT
system, as it stood, was a hindrance to nearly every activity
that makes a good university great.
The good news for Dobrin was that there was a lot of
room for improvement. The bad news was that state and
city budgets would not support increased spending, even
though demand for affordable higher education in New
York City was huge and growing. Dobrin’s challenge was
to stage a massive upgrade across virtually the entire IT
system under stringent fiscal constraints. The solution was
the phased implementation of the CUNY Fully Integrated
Resources and Services Tool
(CUNYfirst) initiative.
PROJECT ORIENTATION
CUNYfirst was a strategy
six years in the making.
When Dobrin first began
exploring options for
revamping the university’s IT system, he and his
team were leaning toward
PeopleSoft. With the 2004
announcement that Oracle
had acquired PeopleSoft,
Dobrin put the search on
hold, shifting his attention
from prospective solutions
to determining user needs.
He and his staff engaged
users from every campus
and every business unit
across the university to find
out what they needed from
the new system. He also
reassured leaders across
the institution that the uni-
versity was committed to a single solution—an important
message, because it would be costly and problematic for
individual campuses and separate business units to begin
developing solutions on their own.
When Dobrin was satisfied that Oracle would continue
to actively support PeopleSoft software, he restarted his conversations with Oracle and continued to explore the benefits
of the software. Those conversations led to CUNY awarding
the contract to Oracle in May 2007. According to Dobrin,
another major consideration in making the decision was
Oracle’s willingness to set a fixed price for the project, with
payments based on specific, measurable deliverables.
An equally important benefit was the breadth and depth
of knowledge and experience in Oracle’s higher education
consulting practice. Oracle’s ability to provide both the software and the implementation team for the project reassured
Dobrin that the sheer scale of the implementation wasn’t
likely to topple the effort. Oracle’s higher education team
had a stellar reputation among the world’s top 10 academic
universities, as well as a broad array of community colleges.
The team’s record of success in helping campuses of all
types and sizes made Oracle an attractive choice for managing everything from laboratory research data and student
demographics to human resource files and financial capital
records. An added appeal was Oracle’s willingness to provide
ongoing support, including training, user productivity kits,
CUNY’s Allan Dobrin (left), Ginger Waters, and Brian Cohen, pictured
outside CUNY’s historic Shepard Hall, helped shape the university’s IT
systems around user needs.
