Over the course of its 152-year history, Cornell University has been consistently recognized for
its exceptional education programs. But in 2014, the university realized it was lagging in one
increasingly important area: delivering a supported and robust technology experience to staff,
students, and faculty. While its users took advantage of the latest technology in other aspects
of their lives, the software Cornell relied on for several student administrative functions—bill
payment, financial aid, grading, and course registration—was slightly behind the times. By
teaming with Deloitte and being willing to take bold steps, Cornell not only made great strides
toward moving to SaaS and Managed Services—they became one of the first universities to
move ahead and deploy Oracle 9.2.
Cornell, a private Ivy League and land-grant doctoral
university, was using an outdated version of Oracle’s
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions (version 8.9) to support the
needs of the modern campus. Today’s students are looking for
a contemporary user experience, and campus administrators
need flexible functionality and a product lifecycle platform to
better manage system maintenance costs. Oracle had already
released two newer versions of the system (versions 9.0 and
9.2). Cornell was missing out on quarterly patches and bug
fixes programmed for the latest releases, and Cornell’s users
were unable to leverage newer features supported through
the latest version.
Knowing that peer universities had already moved off of
8.9, Cornell reached out to several service providers to
take part in a competitive bidding process to find the right
organization to help them upgrade to Campus Solutions 9.0.
After a competitive bidding process to select a partner for the
upgrade to Campus Solutions 9.0, Cornell selected Deloitte.
The Deloitte team began the project by conducting a thorough
upfront discovery using proprietary assessment tools and
asking challenging questions. With all of the groundwork laid,
Deloitte used a clearly defined upgrade strategy and came in
on time and under budget with the 9.0 upgrade. Taking the
right steps at the onset positioned Deloitte for a successful
implementation. With Cornell’s permission, Deloitte used
the savings from the 9.0 upgrade to advance them further to
Campus Solutions 9.2 the following year.
The strategy Deloitte used for this project has been refined
and optimized into a concise strategy for 9.2 upgrades that
can now be used to help other schools implement Oracle 9.2
more quickly.
For more information, visit:
www.deloitte.com/us/higher-ed-technology