So, the new iteration of Just the Facts crashed and burned Monday in its first real trial by fire. Oops? Of course, as anyone familiar with Murphy’s Law knows, anything that can go wrong will go wrong — especially where computer systems are involved, and especially where giant, massive, integrated computer systems that haven’t been disturbed in almost a decade are involved.
As a sysadmin myself, I have the greatest sympathy for the University as far as bugs and other assorted technical challenges are concerned. What really bothers me about the whole rollover, however, is how underprepared the student body was for the change. Despite The Sun’s constant coverage — which has been ongoing since at least October 2006 — leading up to Monday’s attempt to pre-enroll the class of 2009, there had been a general lack of knowledge on campus about the new PeopleSoft system.
And it’s worth pointing out just how substantial a change to the system this is. On paper, it definitely sounded like a jump in the right direction for Cornell — the new system allows for several new pre-enrollment features that, provided they work properly, will definitely make the process quite a bit less painful than in semesters past.
However, the new system clearly has its own set of problems. The web-based interface, which was supposed to have eliminated compatibility problems that have plagued Mac OS users on the old system, in fact demonstrated several performance glitches on the Safari browser, forcing people to run and obtain third-party options like Firefox. Despite my column in Eclipse last week, many technically un-savvy people do not install software beyond the default set provided with their computers, and these people may have found Monday to be a highly unpleasant and frustrating experience.
Of course, they did — but so did everyone else. One of the greatest hopes for the PeopleSoft system is that it would have alleviated the sluggishness that was the old JTF’s trademark. Trying to save course requests produced cryptic COBOL error messages, and only after pressing submit upwards of 30 times would you even have a chance to save your requests. Consequently, a process that has taken me a maximum of 45 minutes in the past required a full two hours Monday, after which the system expired under the weight of a thousand students. Although the system has since returned, “completing testing of the solution to the performance issue with CoursEnroll” is really not the best place to be a full day after your superstar new product is supposed to have launched.
My other major problem with the rollover is timing. Was it really necessary to get PeopleSoft up and running in the middle of this semester? If there end up being larger problems with the system that require a good deal of work to fix, CIT programmers are going to have to work around the clock with PeopleSoft to get patches in place because pre-enrollment must be done before we leave campus for the summer. If instead we had waited for the summer, it would have given system administrators ample time to install the system, perform load testing and correct any bugs like the one that brought the system down Monday.
Hopefully, in the future Cornell will be more open and forthcoming before major system upgrades (and perhaps allocating a bit more time for testing wouldn’t hurt either). Cornellians tend to be a fairly intelligent lot. With a bit more communication, I’m sure the switch to PeopleSoft would have been a great triumph — after all, beating out the old Bear Access for usability is not a tremendously hard thing to do, is it? Instead, we are left with a sour taste in our mouths and with yet another piece of the Big Red bureaucracy that is slow, inefficient and unresponsive.