A former IT employee at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is speaking up after the university switched to a new course registration system.
The former employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, says it never sat well with him that UBC spent millions to transition to the Workday Student system, which he claims they didn’t need.
“The previous system was 30-plus years old and highly customized to students’ needs as well as the different faculty needs…it’s not the way that they’re used to,” the former employee said.
On May 21, UBC transitioned from their Student Service Centre (SSC) system to Workday Student, which students can use to register for their courses, among other academic administrative tasks.
The former employee says while he worked at UBC, he advocated against Workday’s implementation and it ultimately led him to resign. While he wasn’t against a transition, he says he saw no return aside from better reporting and a web app.
“So they didn’t invest in it (SSC), all they did was basically Band-Aid it and keep it working,” he said. “So that technical debt needed to be paid, and if that debt was paid, the platform would be as solid as could be.”
UBC students who spoke to CityNews said they were stressed or frustrated over the transition to Workday Student. The system has also been criticized on the r/UBC page on Reddit, with users claiming the new system is difficult to access or just unusable.
The former employee says he’s not surprised that students are struggling with the system, but doubts UBC will go back to SSC.
“What they had still works, it’s still sitting on the shelf,” he said. “It’s not like the licences ran out — they own it, they wrote it. They could go back to it, but you know no one likes to say they made a mistake and go backwards.”
UBC says SSC could no longer meet the needs of the university
In an email to CityNews, UBC chief information officer Jennifer Burns maintains that SSC could no longer meet the needs of the university.
“After multiple attempts to rebuild the platform proved unfeasible, it was determined that a commercial solution was needed,” said Burns. “The replacement of the university’s student information system is a complex and large-scale initiative that is part of a broader, multi-year, and strategic renewal of all core administrative systems at the university.”
Burns says the budget for the student systems portion of their renewal was $207 million with a contingency of $78 million.
She says, over time, the application will allow staff, faculty and students to have access to all of their information in one place.