The current IT environment at Cornell is characterized by Debt, Duplications, and Distribution.

1. Debt: Many of our systems are outdated and in need of upgrades. This is called “technical debt.”
2. Duplication: Cornell has many instances of similar software in different parts of the university. This includes big systems like Kuali Financial System and SAP or SuccessFactors and Workday, as well has literally hundreds of smaller systems. Some of this is due to the fact that Cornell was an early adopter of some technologies before they were fully fleshed out, so many custom tools have grown to fill gaps.  
3. Distribution: The university organization is itself highly distributed, so many solutions have been developed over time that perform similar tasks.

There are literally hundreds of administrative systems leading to dis-integrated workflows, incompatible data definitions, and a painful experience for users who have to learn which systems do what, and where.  By streamlining and aligning Cornell’s diverse systems and data sets, we can reduce repetitive work, allowing faculty, staff, students, researchers, and other community members to focus more on advancing the university’s mission.

To initiate this effort, Cornell, in partnership with the Huron Consulting Group, is conducting a six-month assessment of our organization, business systems, and procedures. The goal is to enhance the overall digital experience at Cornell, which aims to modernize redundant components, ensuring our community is better equipped to fulfill our mission.

Challenges with our current digital environment

Although the current Cornell technology infrastructure includes a few systems implemented recently, the bulk of our digital environment relies on older, fragmented solutions.

Each of those components was chosen with careful consideration and was the best decision at the time for our resources, needs, and restrictions. Today, that patchwork quilt of systems and data no longer meets the rapidly growing and integrated needs of our community members in locations ranging from the AgriTech farms of Geneva to the student-run clinic for uninsured in New York City, to the biomedical research labs in Al Rayyan, Qatar.

Four primary challenges of current Cornell technology:

• Diverse systems and user interfaces provide a confusing and frustrating user experience.
• Poorly integrated systems impair our ability to do important work efficiently.
• It’s difficult to manage institutional data and produce solid reporting, because we don’t have unified data and data definitions.
• It’s expensive to support so many technology tools and vendors. In addition, several vendors plan to discontinue their products as new product lines are moved to cloud-based solutions.

Benefits of institutionally aligned and streamlined technologies

The cost of maintaining the current systems and data sources is significant, but the more critical need driving this evaluation is to relieve our community members who spend an inordinate amount of time on unnecessary workarounds, manual processes, and maintaining redundant shadow systems.

• Technology simplification: The fastest value will come from saving money by investing in a smaller number of systems. Fewer systems mean fewer integrations. A migration to cloud technologies will also mean an easier-to-maintain back end for IT and faster updates to new features for end users. This will also lower institutional risk and simplify regulatory compliance and security with fewer systems to worry about.
• Process simplification: An integrated system will make it much easier to build seamless processes between and within business units. This takes a little longer to achieve than simply updating the technology, as each administrative unit needs to learn new, more optimal ways to work together.
• Mission effectiveness: The biggest value will come over time in two ways. First, more integrated, accurate, current, and reliable data will improve our ability to manage and plan. A critical goal is to allow for the reallocation of resources towards the mission.

Goals for the Cornell Experience Modernization Initiative (CEMI)

The first phase of CEMI seeks to understand the processes, steps and experiences of the people who rely on Cornell’s current technology, then determine improvements that could better enable the faculty, staff, researchers, students, alumni, parents, patients, and other community members to productively and pleasantly engage with the systems and data to accomplish their goals.

With a firm grasp of how the existing tools meet or do not meet the business process needs of our community, we can explore new approaches to these processes. These approaches may take advantage of untapped features in current systems or require new tools.

The long-term goal of CEMI is to improve the effectiveness of the Cornell mission. With a new unified system, we’ll have better, cleaner data to manage the institution and draw insights about what we do, and we’ll optimize the technology footprint across the university.

Ultimately, we will transform information technology services from a heavy cost to an invaluable asset.

Focus on business functions

While the CEMI assessment will explore the roles and processes used by almost everyone who studies, teaches, researches, and works at Cornell, the initial assessment is focusing on the systems used by:

• Advancement
• Budget
• Finance
• Human Resources
• Research
• Student Services

Broadly used systems included in the initial analysis

Cornell community members depend on many technology tools.

The 2024 CEMI analysis will target:

• Data and Analytics for unified campus reporting. This will not only meet an urgent need, but it will help us identify problems that we hope to address in the new solution.
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as Kuali/KFS, Jenzabar, PeopleSoft, SAP, SuccessFactors, and Workday. Each of these has a related ecosystem of supporting systems for specialized functions like procurement or financial aid.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems like Slate and Salesforce. These are being examined as possible tools for filling gaps or improving the experience of a new unified system.
• “Gap Apps” or smaller ERP or CRM adjacent solutions that have developed over time to fill functions that should be in the core systems but were missing or not optimal at the time these systems were adopted.
• Identity Management for a unified login across our major campuses. For example, Ithaca and Cornell Tech use NetIDs while Weill Cornell Medicine’s campuses use CWIDs, which they share with New York Presbyterian and Columbia. This is a very complex problem with important security and usability implications.

Many other systems and tools will be touched on by this analysis, such as pre-award research administration, Microsoft 365 email, Amazon Web Services, and cloud storage solutions. But they are not the primary focus of this analysis.