The $52 million lemon

Imagine that you were shopping for a new car to replace your old, beat-up car -- the car your mom first bought when she was in college. There's a car that, at first glance, seems to be the answer to all your needs and dreams. But some consumer research brings up major warning flags: it breaks down frequently, it cannot handle excessive mileage or extreme weather conditions. Some of your friends and colleagues have the car you want, but speak frequently of its downsides. Would you buy the car anyway?\nIf you did, it would be awfully difficult to sympathize with you when that vehicle's repairs and maintenance ate up your savings. And, after a while, your repeated stories and complaints about automobile problems would become extremely tiresome.\nThat's the position we're in with IU's seemingly never-ending string of PeopleSoft problems. But, instead of a $20,000 car, IU officials made a $52 million \nblunder.\nLast week, The IDS reported that the University distributed almost $274,000 in excess financial aid because the PeopleSoft system did not flag cases where aid needed to be reduced or cancelled. Several students actually made off with free money -- according to The Herald-Times, some students received federal Pell grants who, afterward, never enrolled in class. Fortunately for the student beneficiaries of these little glitches, they won't have to repay the money. But it's certainly costing IU, which not only has to repay the excess aid, but also spend money and time on internal reviews, as well as on patching up the problems that caused this mess in the first place.\nOf course these "repair fees" aren't the first additional costs (and probably won't be the last) that the PeopleSoft system has caused for the University. In 2004, admitted students didn't receive information about their financial aid packages in a timely manner. As a result, we experienced an enrollment shortage and lost millions in tuition.\nThus, the total cost of the sketchy PeopleSoft system has been far more than the reported $52 million-over-six-years that the University spent to convert from our old student information \nsystem.\nSo the question is: Why did IU commit such a hefty sum to a program with so many known problems? In 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that officials from seven Big Ten Universities wrote a joint letter to PeopleSoft describing the findings of their pooled experience with the system and their "great concern" about those findings. The key complaints were regarding poor performance and responsiveness (called "simply unacceptable") and software quality ("too many bugs" and fixes that are "not well tested and poorly deployed"). These universities reported "spending an enormous amount of time and money getting the software ready to work at (their) schools."\nFast-forward seven years. We're still waiting for the software to work and still spending ridiculous amounts of time and money on a product we knew was faulty and costly at the outset. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with a "lemon" we shouldn't have purchased in the first place. Isn't it about time to ask how this happened, to ask why we're clearly not getting our money's worth?