How Open University went from bespoke IT to vanilla SAP
During a presentation at the #itelli2019 for the SAP Community annual conference in London, Chris Youles, chief information officer (CIO) of Open University (OU), describes how SAP consultant intelligence helped the Open University to replace 20-year-old legacy systems with new SAP cloud products.
The OU also used resources from Infosys, its offshore IT provider, to free up in-house IT staff, so they could work on an SAP business transformation initiative.
There were several business drivers behind the project. The university needed to modernise they way it operated, its business processes and the system it used. From an IT perspective, he says: “Some of the tech was going end-of-life and we had to upgrade. I used fear to frighten the board so they had to agree do something.”
Since the OU was established half a century ago, the world of distance learning has changed. It used to deliver courses on audio cassettes, then CD, then DVD, and now online to any student, globally.
From a business perspective, he says: “The OU has a huge amount at stake.” For instance, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are all pushing hard to provide distance learning.
“The OU has to keep a close eye at what the market wants,” says Youles. “But we have more agile competitors. The OU needs to regain its position as a world leader in distance learning. Digital transformation is core.”
For him, the OU needs to understand what digital transformation meant to its business. “It is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Youles. “We wanted to get data-driven student stuff, so we needed to get new back-ends. My users don’t care if there are boxes in our server room. They care about the services they can deliver to students.”
Youles decided to standardise on a new cloud-hosted SAP system, implemented with help from intelligence. Infosys was also asked to give a second opinion on the project. “I am delivering SAP ERP as a minimal viable product,” he says, “For instance, the features users ask for may not be included in the vanilla SAP implementation. “This is not often palatable to the users who want to transform their work,” says Youles. “If we don’t have resolve, we won’t do this. We needed to keep the folks cajoled. It’s like herding cows.” As an example of the type of conversations he needed to have, he describes how the OU’s HR director wanted a talent management module. “We can live without that for a while. It’s more important to ensure people are getting paid than having the ability to recruit people.” post-digital era Accenture is calling it a post-digital era , one where businesses are already looking beyond digitisation to capitalise on new tech-driven opportunities. digital disruption As technology changes have an increasing impact on organisations, 2019 is the year when CIOs must adapt their teams to better manage digital disruption and business innovation. In late 2017, Youles he spoke to the board at the OU about why it was essential to stay on vanilla SAP.
