The discussions on the "Office of Continuing Education-GONE?" thread got me wondering, "Just how did Ole Miss and Mississippi State avoid the 'budgetary black hole' that is PeopleSoft?"

As an "oldtimer" I remember 1998-99, and the days of Horace Fleming's crony, the self-named "smartest man on campus, when it comes to technology issues," John McGowan.  At that time, the argument against the Honeywell Bull mainframe computer was that it was old and obsolete, and "constantly needed software patches."  Furthermore, McGowan said that the primary USM software used for registration, budget, and payroll "wasn't Year 2K compliant" so we needed to replace BOTH the hardware and the software at the same time.

We told that USM had to choose between PeopleSoft and Banner, and the argument was that PeopleSoft was the "better of the two choices."   LVN commented that:  "there was only one other computer system besides People Soft commercially available at the time and it was crap too."

Back then, BEFORE the decision to stake millions of dollars on "technology upgrades," the Faculty Senate asked why the principal university software couldn't be developed in-house, as neither Ole Miss or Mississippi State were contracting with PeopleSoft.  This question was not given an adequate answer then, and some seven years later, it appears that the other comprehensive universities made a better decision than USM. 

PeopleSoft was one of the factors that eventually led to SFT as university president, because Horace Fleming lost his last faculty support in a meeting in the Liberal Arts Building.  At that meeting, the admission that the Provost's budget line had given millions of dollars to the Office of Technology Resources, (OTR is now iTech) for the "PeopleSoft implementation" and the revelation that faculty positions had been sacrificed for OTR brought great hostility from the assembled faculty.  The question of "staying with a stable software configuration" versus the nearly-constant PeopleSoft upgrades elicited the response that the USM PeopleSoft contract mandated the quarterly "system upgrades" at $250K per upgrade.

I don't know how other Mississippi institutions run their primary system software, but USM has gotten "stuck" with the patchwork provided by PeopleSoft.  And, with Horace Fleming losing support from the IHL, the PeopleSoft decision added "loss of faculty support" to his problems, with the eventual result of the one-year contract extension offered to Fleming by IHL, his resignation, and the "search" that led to SFT.