{"id":166,"date":"2007-06-12T22:53:40","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T05:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2007\/06\/12\/sims-horrors\/"},"modified":"2007-06-12T22:53:40","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T05:53:40","slug":"sims-horrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2007\/06\/12\/sims-horrors\/","title":{"rendered":"SIMS Horrors"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned previously<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

This led me to spending a chunk of the day learning about SIMS, both the system and the group that manages it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

It is 154 pages long. One hundred and fifty-four.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n