Greg and Kat's blog

As I mentioned previously, I’m trying to get some student data for a side project. The data is housed in SIMS (Student Information Management System), which is pretty much the internal group that does goSFU.

This led me to spending a chunk of the day learning about SIMS, both the system and the group that manages it.

First, remember that we paid tens of millions for the whole SIMS/goSFU/Peoplesoft thing. That doesn’t count the productivity lost across the University to the horrible interface. Admittedly, a lot of what we paid for was a level of certainty that there would be no catastrophic failure. When we wake up tomorrow, there will still be a record that I work there, and the students in my courses will still be registered.

The SIMS team is apparently either swamped with necessary customizations or paralysed by the complexity of the task before them. I was told today about a two and a half year wait by a staff member to get a simple minor customization.

What tipped me over the edge tonight was a document I received titled “SIMS Reporting Database Tables–Field Descriptions”. The reporting database is most, but not all of the student-related data in the system. This document is a list of fields in each table (with a sentence or so about each one).

It is 154 pages long. One hundred and fifty-four.

And, it obviously wasn’t even included in the millions we paid Peoplesoft. It is information compiled by SFU staff. It contains useful snippets like:

• “Not sure what field represents or if field is used. Most values are (blank) with a few exceptions”
• “Some dollar figure, no idea???”
• “A level between 1-5. Not sure which end of the range is the high end.”
• “A flag . ‘Y’, ‘N’ — All ‘N’ so not used?”

I don’t want to knock the poor employee(s) that wrote those things: they did the best they could with what they had to work with. But, if you were selling a database-backed system that was customizable and cost millions of dollars, wouldn’t you throw in some documentation?