Back to it

Back for the new year! Hope you all had some good times over the holidays. We’re gearing up for a gathering next week of the functional heads to discuss our target state and how we get there. We need to have this discussion as a level setting prior to beginning to upgrade seven PeopleSoft systems to 8.9. We plan on beginning with fairly high-level, truth-and-beauty type of stuff positioned as the guiding principles and working our way to identifying the business drivers for the upgrades, identifying the deltas between the target state and our current state(s), and how to leverage the upgrade opportunity to close gaps, eliminate customizations and standardize.

There’s a fair amout of angst in some groups about all this. It’s hard enough to manage an upgrade like this without cluttering it with a desire to quantify and seek improvements for the greater good. We’re keeping this as a business-only session so we can keep a sharp focus on having business justification for the upgrade activities. For example, there’s a very interesting proposal floating around that shows ho we could gain advantages by moving some of our regional instances onto combined hardware platforms. There’s no denying that it would bring clear advantages but very few of them will improve the business processes that the systems support – and in fact it may make some of them more difficult.

Given that these are proprietary discussions, I’ll try to extract some meaning from them to report, but my mileage may vary.