Curtiss Barnes' blog

Unless you were paying close attention the last few weeks, you probably missed an important series of events and announcements in the world of interoperability standards for the learning industry.

One of the "beauties" of standards and standards organizations is that there are so many of them, but few actually are what they claim to be - standards. In my opinion, getting to be a standard should require, at a minimum, 1) a common design specification; 2) created by a community of trading partners (meaning balanced, but not undercut or diluted, by the interests of all parties); 3) developed with the goal of eliminating "friction" in the market; 4) adopted by an ever-increasing share of the market (which in this case should mean the students and academics who are at the heart and soul of the industry) and 5) established in a manner that ensures long term sustainability.

Which is precisely why I think we are at a bit of an inflection point in the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS, nee IMS Enterprise) specification; here's the most recent part of the story (the inflection point?) in reverse chronological order^:

• Pearson Education announced on November 5th that they intend to adopt LIS and work with Oracle to integrate a variety of their learning solutions including MyLabs and Mastering products as well as their newly announced LearningStudio platform (a combination of eCollege and Fronter). Several millions of students use these products.
• IMS CEO Rob Abel, on November 4th, highlighted the support of LIS from a number of student system vendors, namely Oracle, SunGardHE and Jenzabar. Tens of millions of students worldwide, and probably more than a million faculty, use these three vendors' products.
• That same day, in his annual update on the Campus Computing Survey, Casey Green showed data that indicates academic computing organizations and resources are under pressure, all while more classes adopt LMS, and new technologies like wikis, ebooks and other Web 2.0 technologies are in ever-greater demand for instructional use.
• Generally Available (GA) as of October 30th, the SAIP, Oracle's implementation of LIS , has batch and event-based integration with multi-target integration capability and the whole functional overlay with the ability to scope and associate classes down to the granular level.
• Gilfus Education, on October 27th, predicted that the "combination of academic and administrative functionality into a more cohesive experience" will be among the top innovation trends. While they've got their own approach to resolving that demand, I think they've got the trend right.
• On October 22nd, at the IMS Quarterly meeting, a collection of vendors, institutions and organizations met to discuss the role the LIS specification and its potential for expansion into ever greater scope encompassing the administrative and academic functionality. Another outcome of this session was the announcement of the LIS Alliance and the next phase of conformance definition to ensure long-term sustainability of the standard.
• At the same IMS meeting, on October 21st, Oracle demonstrated real-time, LIS based integration to not one, but three independent systems that could play a role in the learning arena - Sakai, Inigral's Schools on Facebook, and Oracle's new Beehive collaboration suite. It was a snoozer of a demo, to quote Michael Feldstein "it was like the inverse of a magic trick, instead of making something trivial look miraculous, it made something heretofore remarkably difficult look incredibly easy."

If you know how the trick works, it isn't magic, but that's the point, isn't it? A "friction free" environment, based on common definitions, that makes all of this stuff work. But the reality is, what Linda Feng of Oracle and the rest of the LIS team was able to show was a very quiet revolution. It:

1. Showed the power, value and yet unmet potential of the standard. This will be fundamental to encouraging and ensuring actual adoption by the industry, especially when there are supposed members of the community and our partners who continue to tell customers that the standard is not baked or implementable.
2. Demonstrated that Oracle's implementation of LIS, the SAIP, is making great strides in solving the key integration challenges. Not only did it demonstrably provision multiple systems, but performed this integration at a granular (ie. class section) level. In a world where faculty and students must have multiple kinds of technologies at their disposal to satisfy the learning experience, the power of interoperability really begins to emerge.

And what we really like about the IMS approach is that LIS is fully compatible with a family of standards (namely Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability - LTI) that create a path from administrative systems to a large variety of teaching and learning systems.

For us at Oracle, this is still really just the beginning. As the LIS Alliance expands the scope of enterprise objects and functions supported in the specification, we are also working to innovate the implementation via middleware (ie. service bus).

We are now at a point in our industry where we can collectively focus more on the challenges of students, faculty and administrators rather than on the former/current challenges of numerous point-to-point proprietary integrations. We applaud the commitment of our direct competitors named above who are participating and that of our partners like Pearson, Unicon, MoodleRooms, Inigral and the Sakai Project.

It is attitude turned into action that will drive these innovations, and the trend to action appears to have arrived. Anybody else want to get on board?

^In brief, the rest of the history: LIS definition was completed in 2008 with a broad number of industry participants. Oracle adopted it and delivered the first implementation of LIS in a product called Student Administration Integration Pack (SAIP) in August 2008 using Sakai as reference architecture (thanks to Unicon for helping on the Sakai side of the equation!)

Sorry this is slow in coming after my first entry back in July. This one got a bit bogged down in our internal review process. Surprisingly, it emerged fundamentally intact. Go figure.

A few weeks, check that, months, ago we announced the Continuous Delivery Model for Campus Solutions. While we've actually been rolling out the news since the Alliance Conference back in March, it's a significant enough change that many of our customers and industry observers are still asking what it's all about. So I thought it would be useful to commit a few words here.

First and foremost, this is an inflection point for us and represents the first (highly visible) move to the next generation of PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions (CS). Several years ago, when Oracle announced Applications Unlimited, we indicated that we would continue the development of CS with a vision of the very long run. Since then we have released the very substantial set of enhancements that comprise CS9.0. Many of our customers have upgraded to that release and are taking advantage of the Enrollment Back Pack and improvements in the internet-native Student Self-Service module, as well as features like Population Select/Update, which have enhanced productivity across all administrative offices.

Second, we've had ongoing discussions with our customers about finding ways to both reduce the scope of upgrades - especially those in the combined PeopleSoft CS-HR instance - and accelerate the time to market of new features. Upgrades - ours and those of our competitors - have their own history, and I think we all appreciate the idea that the old model existed because big release cycles were necessary to accommodate scope as ERP products evolved architecturally and matured in terms of functionality. In many respects, the features we want to add to Campus Solutions going forward are incremental to the core application. We have a great opportunity to roll those out to our customers on a regular basis - and that's exactly what we proved with the release of the first Feature Pack. That means that half of our customer base, those already on CS9.0, can adopt those features whenever they are ready.

We have been finding venues to meet with customers for direct dialogue on the implications of this change both in the U.S. and abroad these last few weeks. I'm delighted with the response, which has been extremely positive. The HEUG leadership, industry analysts and customers have all come forward with supportive, positive statements. That said, a few questions have been asked along the way that I feel compelled to answer here:

Q: Does this mean that Campus Solutions is dead, that there won't be another release after CS9.0?
A: No. Ok, so we got used to a naming and numerical convention, so I get the root of the question. The fact is, we've already had two significant product enhancement releases since CS9.0 first shipped in late 2006. There was a bundle in August 2008 that included the initial Campus Solutions Web Services Framework and then Feature Pack 1 in late June 2009. No, it isn't dead, just in a different phase of "life."

Q: Are the Feature Packs going to be license events?
A: The Feature Packs' primary purpose is to deliver incremental functionality to our customers. Feature Pack 1, which shipped in late June, has no license requirements for customers. Easy enough to understand, I hope, but I will point out that some future Feature Packs may include licensable components because of increased functionality. They are the delivery vehicle; some stuff will be free, some will not, and we'll let you know in advance what's what.

Q: This means we will always be upgrading?
A: No. Feature Packs are like the Maintenance Bundles in that they are delivered in the same way and are planned to be part of the required maintenance stream. Unlike Maintenance Bundles, however, the intent is for you to deploy the new functionality when you want - when business needs dictate. We intend to ship the features we deliver in the Feature Packs in disabled mode, so you get to determine when you want to roll out the planned incremental functionality to your users. Not much difference than in the past, but the expectation is that this may be done a few times a year, not every few years.

So what's next? Well, stay tuned for our regular updates on the PeopleSoft 9.1 releases. We also recently published the Campus Solutions Statement of Direction, now posted on My Oracle Support, highlighting our targeted updates/enhancements for the next 12 months. Beyond that, I expect we will hear more buzz about some other activities at Oracle. And we'll get to that later.

I'm sure other questions will arise about the Continuous Delivery Model as we learn how the customer base adopts the Feature Packs and as we progress with evolving the Campus Solutions suite. We will continue to use a variety of channels to communicate with the customer base to ensure everyone has up to date information.

For those of you wondering, my previous blog got well over 3,000 views (and a couple of supportive e-mails) which I think means I'd better keep this up. Thanks to Edu1World and the HEUG for syndicating this to help reach the audience.

cpb

This is my first blog, ever. I’m a little nervous about this endeavor since I’ve read somewhere that the average blog has a viewership of 1.5, which tells me that, mostly, the writer and the fractionally-multiplied reader are the same person.

I hope that the missives I’m able to compose in the future are informative and entertaining enough to capture a larger audience. My first, and only so far, podcast has had over 900 hits, but I think several hundred of those were my daughters who found it very funny to hear my voice emanating from the computer.

I think a reasonable target to test this particular Web 2.0 version of our customer communications is at least 5% of our customer base. The Higher Education User Group (HEUG) indicates they have around 18,000 individual subscribers (representing hundreds of institutions), so 904 views will be my original goal. I know, the math doesn’t work, but don’t forget to add 1 for my wife, my oldest daughter (who at 7 is amazingly web-savvy), and my mom. Oh, and 1 more for me.

Seriously, the plan is for me to blog on a few subjects that might be useful for our higher education customers, and prospective customers, in terms of staying up to date on what Oracle is doing in the industry, what issues we see in the market, and what our customers are doing with our solutions to advance the missions of their institutions. Some of the topics I’ll address are:

• The Value of IT in the Education Enterprise – We are at an interesting phase in the industry IT cycle: whether it’s a function of the troubling macro-economic conditions, oversized expectations of faculty, staff and students, or simply IT fatigue, a number of institutions are exploring the question of IT value. This will be a series of posts over time and I hope to include real-world examples of institutions that are wrestling with this topic on their campuses.


• CRM4HE – For a number of years we have been developing industry-specific capabilities in PSFT CRM to serve the “constituent lifecycle” on campus. Several interesting developments in CRM technology and the education industry at large make this an important topic to address to help campuses understand the alternatives that are available.


• Web Services, SOA and Community Source – Mark Armstrong, Vice President of Development for Higher Education at Oracle and I will combine efforts to discuss Service Orientation and what we are doing with Oracle products in Higher Education. We have a vision for how our relationship, and indeed product development dynamic, with our customers will change in the years ahead. As we execute this architectural shift, it’s important to understand that the user community will play a key role in new ways.


• The Higher Education User Community – We are blessed with a strong, sophisticated and supportive user community in the HEUG. As primary liaison to the HEUG Board, I’ll give regular updates on our activities with the HEUG, the Product Advisory Groups (PAGs), and the strategic relationship we share. We also have an Education Industry Strategy Council and other advisory groups that are not necessarily HEUG affiliates, and I will provide some insights gleaned from those groups over time.


• Ongoing Updates and Reactions to Industry Events – What good would a blog be if we didn’t take the opportunity to share regular updates? Look to this space for information and updates on our strategies and product deliveries.

So there it is, the first in what I hope will be a number of well-viewed and informative posts. I’ll be checking the statistics routinely and testing the audience to make sure I meet the established goal not just of numbers but of relevance, if only to avoid the fate of writer-reader singularity.