About
The Cornell Experience Modernization Initiative (CEMI) will unify and improve the university’s systems and processes to better serve our entire community—faculty, researchers, clinicians, students, staff, alumni, partners, and donors. By creating more efficient and user-friendly experiences, CEMI will enable our community members to focus on what matters most: advancing Cornell’s mission.
The Issues
Cornell leaders across our campuses have identified four critical challenges, known as the “4 Ds” — debt, duplication, distribution, and data:
Debt
Our aging systems require significant upgrades and maintenance, creating a burden of “technical debt” that grows more costly over time.
Duplication
We maintain multiple systems that perform similar functions, like Kuali and SAP for financial operations, SuccessFactors and Workday for HR functions.
Distribution
Cornell’s distributed nature is a strength, but has led to wide variations over time that would work more efficiently with common functions across teaching, learning, research, and administrative operations.
Data
The lack of unified data and data definitions across systems hinders our efficiency and effectiveness in decision-making.
The Solutions
To address the interconnected challenges of debt, duplication, distribution, and data, CEMI is building a unified, modern administrative ecosystem that reduces complexity, improves consistency, and enables better decision-making across Cornell’s global campuses.
By consolidating platforms and integrating systems, CEMI will eliminate redundant work, lower costs, and free teams from time-consuming manual processes and workarounds. These efforts will create a more connected and efficient experience for the Cornell community—streamlining workflows, improving access to reliable data, and making it easier to collaborate across campuses. Just as importantly, this approach allows Cornell to shift investment away from maintaining aging, fragmented systems and toward innovative, future-ready technologies.
Similar goals guide each phase of the new ecosystem’s development: improving the way Cornell community members utilize these broad systems to accomplish their daily responsibilities.
These improvements include:
- Streamlined workflows
- Standardized processes
- Simplified reporting
- Real-time access to reliable data
- Easier collaboration across campuses
CEMI’s solutions will focus on:
