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This is The Possibility Perspective.
The show where we peel back the layers on enhancing enterprise solutions with Workday magic and PeopleSoft innovation. We’ll sit with real-time customers who've participated in our tailored services.
Whether you're eyeing a smooth Workday transition or modernizing your PeopleSoft with the power of Amazon’s public cloud (AWS), we've got you covered. We’ll dive into topics from cloud migrations to fluid user experiences.
Tune in and empower yourself with the knowledge to optimize your enterprise solutions.
Todd Smoak [00:00:00]:
We got into a relationship with ERPA because we had confidence in their ability to help us leverage AWS and they had the transparency we were looking for in that access in what they were doing.
Jeff Miller [00:00:15]:
Hello friends, I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to strategic minded Workday customers who partner with ERPA for a better Workday experience, having challenges with enterprise application uptime and interested in transforming your institution's technical support. In today's episode, we'll explore how Illinois State University has done just that. Joining us on The Possibility Perspective is Todd Smoak, Executive Director of Technology Solutions at Illinois State University. After facing staffing challenges in a competitive local talent pool, along with compelling factors like stability and uptime, Todd shares his journey of migrating Illinois State University's PeopleSoft infrastructure to AWS. He discusses the challenges and victories encountered along the way and the role ERPA's managed services have played in the positive outcome. You'll hear the secret ingredients Todd has found to maximize and optimize PeopleSoft, something all PeopleSoft administrators want to do. You'll also learn about the value of a managed services partner and how removing worry and freeing up brain space for your internal team can benefit your institution as a whole as well as your individual team members. Let's get started.
Jeff Miller [00:01:34]:
Well Todd, thanks for joining us today on The Possibility Perspective. Really excited to hear your story, your journey to the cloud and much more. If you wouldn't mind first, Todd. Let's start off. You just tell us a little bit about yourself and then also a little bit about Illinois State University.
Todd Smoak [00:01:50]:
Sure, thanks for having me, Jeff. Todd Smoak I'm Executive Director of Technology at Illinois State University. So I'm really in charge of enterprise applications and really all the a lot of the business functionality that really drives behind the scenes of the university, whether it's on the ERP side, which is student information systems and HR and so forth, or on the learning management side like Canvas, all the tools that enable the university ecosystem right, to survive. So my teams are responsible really for managing all those different types of tools and putting them to work for the university. For sure. I've been with Illinois State for going on 13 years now, working my way up there in the leadership areas just to again take on more and more responsibility over all of these areas. And I came in to manage one area and, and next thing you know they saddled me with all of them so. Or a lot of them anyway.
Todd Smoak [00:02:46]:
Right. So yeah, I've been here a while and I spent a Few other years back in the day at Purdue, so I've got some good higher ed experience. And in the middle, I took off to the corporate sector, public and private, worked in some different spaces, learned about how the businesses function, and tried to bring that back to the higher education market where, you know, one of. One of our core values is teaching and learning and growing the next future generations. And I think that's going to be really important to society as a whole as we go forward. Not just as a country, but as a world, for sure. Besides Illinois State University, I spent a few years back in the day at Purdue University as well. And then I jumped into the private sector and then public sector companies before circling back to higher ed, where I think I'm connected to the mission of higher ed, which is about educating tomorrow's leaders, right. And I think it's going to be really important for us now and in the future.
Jeff Miller [00:03:41]:
That's awesome. I love that you mentioned Purdue University. As a person who was born and raised in Indiana, half of my graduating class went to Purdue, so the other half went to Bloomington State School in Indiana. Great to know you've got a little bit of Boilermaker in your blood. That's good to hear, Todd. And it sounds like I'm talking to the right person, given your experience, especially Illinois State University with a growing responsibilities, really, year over year. If you wouldn't mind, could you take us back to the beginning of your journey before your AWS modernization and just talk about your application landscape back then?
Todd Smoak [00:04:18]:
Sure. And you know, Illinois State University was actually, I think, a little bit late to the game in some of that application modernization, right? Because we were still on a mainframe for some of our services until 2015. We actually moved the HR system first in 2011 into PeopleSoft, and then a couple years later, we moved the student information system into PeopleSoft Campus Solutions as well. And that kind of ended our mainframe run. So that to me, that was late when I came to Illinois State, I was like, what do you mean there's still part of a mainframe here? What are you talking about? And, and so we're in for a roller coaster, right, of heavy learning, heavy change, modernization, not just with the applications, right?
Todd Smoak [00:05:06]:
But the business process that goes with the ability to configure or customize and how to make that work for you and be safe. And we, as an institution, we learned a lot along the way. Right out of the gate, there was heavy holding on to existing business process and style and mechanisms and not wanting to totally understand and Embrace how applications delivered functionality. And over time we learned, whoa, we actually need to spend more time in how does the application just do it? How can we bend to the application? Because is there brand value in maintaining what we're used to versus can we make this work for us? The university definitely went through this kind of change management growth and it was definitely hard on some. And by the time we got to Campus Solutions we really understood, no, we don't want to customize, we really want to retool ourselves to make the best use of these tools. And so we knew it was going to be hard for us to keep maintaining this larger and larger stack of applications that we were having to run, that we needed to essentially replace mainframe functionality. Because it wasn't just PeopleSoft, Campus Solutions and Peoples of HCM. It was another layer of applications that also provided additional functioning for housing, dining, you know, admissions, those pieces and, and so being able to do all of that ourselves based on where we're located in central Illinois, competing with some big corporations, Corporate home of State Farm, the corporate home of Caterpillar, which is down the street forever.
Todd Smoak [00:06:44]:
I think they've, they redeclared that. They moved to Florida, but they got some big facilities here. So it's, there's a there they recruit a lot of IT talent and leverage them. And so as a higher ed space, it is hard to, to compete with them in the talent pool. And so we knew that we were going to be limited and in that talent pool space and to have to run all of these applications. We knew we needed to figure out what could we do in the cloud, how could we leverage third parties, managed services and some other things to help us provide these systems the care and feeding they needed. And initially we went with the major vendor players in that space, right? We said, hey, you're bringing us the software, can you just run it for us? Can you do stuff for us? And so our journey to the cloud started with that and it was like, okay, we're up and running. We had so many hurdles to overcome that.
Todd Smoak [00:07:36]:
Dealing with the infrastructure, dealing with the applications itself, we didn't have to worry about as much. We let someone else deal with that. But as we got up and running and we started to kind of want to fine tune our environment, right? And to really like make the most of it, we found that our relationships and our contracts and that kind of stuff, that it wasn't working for us, right? That's the friendly way to put it. And we were getting really frustrated about the services that we Were getting the speed, the flexibility, the scheduling, the performance. Hey, it's working if it turns on for one person. No, that's not okay. We have a ISU has a student population of around 21,000 enrollments, plus another, almost 4,000 employees, plus the fact that another, those 5,000 of those students also work a part time job here too. So there's a lot of people using all these systems at any given time, and we needed to make sure that they could perform, especially on times when we would have large hits to the system, like course registration.
Todd Smoak [00:08:38]:
You'd be bringing in thousands of people to all compete and sign up for courses, right? Some of which we know are only offered by one time a day or, or maybe that perfect time of day, right? Everyone wants a certain course that starts at a certain time because that's easier than getting up too early or those things that we struggle with when we're going through college, the college life, I would say. And so we struggled with some of our application performance once we got used to knowing how the systems worked and how we could make it work for us. Then we came back to like, how do we make these systems perform better? And we realized that we needed to make a change in how we were hosting and how we were managing our services and what we needed to make sure that those services would flex for us when we needed the muscle, when we needed the muscle of those applications to highly perform, and when we needed to move a lot of data to make sure that we were understood and we felt secure in our partnerships with those third parties, that we would have someone that we could call and be like, we, we need help. This is not working right.
Todd Smoak [00:09:44]:
And we wouldn't get stuck in a ticket queue or stuck in a, could you please tell us why this system is important to you? Kind of questions. And so we needed to investigate how we could make that better. And that is ultimately what led us into the AWS space, right? So we had already been doing some AWS stuff on our side, but we knew the AWS ecosystem was performing well for us, it was performing well for others. And we immediately thought, hey, this is around the time that really AWS definitely was leading. Azure's out there, Oracle, OCI is coming on board, and they're trying to move people into that space too, from some of their legacy services that they had. And okay, we know this is a performing space.
Todd Smoak [00:10:29]:
People are using it, they're liking it, they're liking what they're getting out of it. How can we do that? How can we take Advantage of what seems to be some nice service offerings in the space, Something we've already had some exposure to. And how do we find partnerships that understand it, can teach us, can help us grow and feel comfortable about what we have access to or what they can do for us versus ultimately what can we do for ourselves? How much control do we have? How much visibility? A lot of it is about visibility into your ecosystem. Like, I, I know what I have, I can see what I have, I trust what I have. And that's really important because when you're talking to a provider who's basically got a black box or a curtain, but you feel like, hey, all of our stuff is behind this curtain. Yeah, we got you covered. It's all back there. You don't know if it's a Pinto or a Ferrari because you can't really see it, right?
Todd Smoak [00:11:19]:
I don't know if we can use that language in here, Jeff, or not, but I think people would get the message of you just don't know or you don't know if it's a jalopy, right? What is back there and how do we get that? How do we make sure it stays upgraded and stays up to the latest and gets. Gets environmental and ecosystem refreshed. As we know that intel and AMD are busting out new processors and there are all these new storage stacks constantly coming and all these different technologies that are making that stuff higher performing and more efficient spaces. And we reached out that time into RFP and we said, hey, companies, what can you do for us? We have some ideas. We're thinking we might like to go. We definitely want to be in a cloud hosted space or something. We want to go with what you're recommending.
Todd Smoak [00:12:01]:
What can you do for us? How would that look? How would that shape? We struggle in the talent pool. So we can't, we can't. We know we can't do it all ourselves. So we need someone who can help us do it. But also know that we want to have some skin in the game, right? We want to be there. We don't want to put ourselves into some kind of situation where if we're unhappy or if things change, we need to be able to see what we've got in advance to adjust.
Todd Smoak [00:12:24]:
Or maybe someday we're able to do some of this on our own. Maybe because it's really automated and efficient and we can do it. Or maybe it's, you know. Yeah, we've learned enough to feel much more confident in that. Don't know. But we wanted Some options, right? And so we did a RP and we reached out and that's how we eventually met ERPA. And we got into a relationship with ERPA because we had confidence in their ability to help us leverage AWS. And they had the transparency we were looking for in that access, in what they were doing in the cost modeling and everything of the environment and the pass through to us.
Todd Smoak [00:13:03]:
Because part of that is too like cloud services, the pricing is public and there's all these discount levels that can get crazy to understand, but at the end of the day, you sure don't want to be paying more for storage than is the public pricing. Storage is now a commodity. Some of these things are commodity. You really want pass through commodity pricing for what you're used to. When you go and get this, what you need is the expertise of leveraging that commodity, stacking on the applications, running the application, automating that infrastructure to deliver for you to use those scaling capabilities and the flexible capabilities and the ability to swap out infrastructure with different infrastructure when you need higher performing or when you have issues or when you have growth or those sorts of things. And so that's what led us into the AWS space. And now we've been there. I think we're going on four years, five years with all of our, I want to say we're completing our fourth year this year of having our PeopleSoft running in AWS.
Todd Smoak [00:14:03]:
It's super solid. I don't know what the best car model is for that. Maybe a Camry or something. It's, you know, it performs well. It's right where we want it to be. We feel very confident in what we have in that space and it really is working for us. It's, it's no longer something that we worry about when peak loads hit. They're all really managed.
Todd Smoak [00:14:23]:
We used to have these calls every semester, emergency, just in case line, right, let's go ahead and set up the call in case there's any kind of thing going on. We'll all be ready, we'll all be staged. And so we would have those calls. We'd all be sitting around like, yeah, numbers look good, performance looks good. All right, well, I don't think we need to be here anymore, right? No, I think we're good. 30 seconds has passed. We're over the hump. We can see registrations happening.
Todd Smoak [00:14:50]:
And so we eventually be like, we don't actually need to have that. We don't need to have those startup worrisome points people. Our customers aren't tracking outages anymore. They used to keep their own tabs on us because they were just unhappy with the environmental performance. So there is only so much you can do when you're under contract. And like the contract says, it's not very clear on this, what, where are we getting this performance or not? Right. And so we knew that and we were able to reset some of those expectations, starting new contracts and going with a new provider too. And that helped us in that space as well.
Jeff Miller [00:15:23]:
You've answered a bunch of my questions that I had prepared for you. You've tackled a lot of the obstacles already. You talked about the resourcing challenges. Obvious, there was a lot of competition for the talent pool locally there because of some of the other big organizations locally. You've talked about some of the pain points that you were experiencing that led you to explore the cloud AWS in particular, the compelling factors behind that. You've talked about how you found ERPA and why you went with ERPA. You've talked about some of the benefits that you've enjoyed now that you've been, what, beginning your fourth year on AWS and some of the results that you've experienced there. Let me go back to one question related to your cloud migration journey itself.
Jeff Miller [00:16:07]:
So were there any challenges that you faced in the cloud migration journey itself? And if there were, how did you overcome those?
Todd Smoak [00:16:15]:
Well, sure. I mean, at least in our journey to AWS, one of the things that we didn't know or understand was how was the compute and memory and storage going to translate into this new environment that's a little bit different, you know, from a performance perspective, how is it going to perform? Do we need the same specifications, greater or less than. And so we did initially look at some different metrics and think, well, this is what our throughput is over in the space. And then we needed to look at more metrics in terms of integration. Broker is one of these integration services that PeopleSoft has, and it's a big tool. It routes messaging internal to PeopleSoft as well as you can use it to route messaging external to PeopleSoft. We had looked at a lot of the external messaging that's communication with our other systems and had planned for that, but we didn't understand and grasp, I think, the internal messaging and the amount of messaging it does for itself there. And so as part of that migration, we stood up, the services realized they weren't performing where we needed to.
Todd Smoak [00:17:14]:
And we knew that we're going to have to stand up, change the performance and horsepower. But I will tell you that we were pleasantly surprised when like they were like, okay, hold on, you know, click, click, click. Thirty minutes later, all the services are coming up in a more higher performing environment. It's like, okay, I think that took care of it. We just deployed twice as much horsepower than we had before. We were able to just move the workloads over. Everything is up and stable now. Now let's monitor it and go again.
Todd Smoak [00:17:43]:
And so we had a couple of those kind of fine tuning cases as we got on board, but I think it was actually really nice to have those. I'm glad we had them because. Because if we hadn't, we wouldn't have been able to see the ease of that operation, right? How automated is this space? How easy is it when you have performance issues that you can, hey, we can adjust for that. It's not the end of the world, It's a few clicks. We're going to change it around, we're going to right size it, we're going to get it. And so over the first few months of our service, moving to AWS, we did that a few times in a few different specific spaces.
Todd Smoak [00:18:16]:
Oh, we're going to need another node for that. We're going to need more horsepower here, we're going to need more memory here. Click, click and deploy redeploy updates and so forth. And we've seen that just get more and more performance improved over time. We've learned how it works, but we also have just been like, yeah, it's working really well for that really makes it work. That really moves us fast and we can get down the road to the next conversation. And now a lot more. What we do is manage the timelines and the schedules for the variety of updates, security patches, program software patches, updates, feature sets.
Todd Smoak [00:18:51]:
And we can really focus in on how do we deliver more value via the taking advantage of new features, taking advantage of features that we weren't using before and try to focus on those things that are really bringing value to the institution and let the infrastructure be automated and let ERP help manage those pieces of it and keep it moving and keep it seamless for us. So I think that's the first thing that kind of comes to mind when I think about challenges of moving to AWS. It's just not knowing the exact right sizing. And at the same time we were, we replanned our doctor and failover and how that stuff was gonna work. And AWS has these regions and different spaces and so we had to make sure that we not only deployed it correctly but understood it, knew how to recover it and could work through those scenarios. So we also felt it's one thing to say you have something, it's another to know how it works and to see it working in action. So in that time period where we want to actually make it happen, okay, show us that we can fail over, show us that we can be up and running, show us that all these pieces are hooked together in the right way so that those migrations and those changes are easy. And one of the telltale signs was too, like, we bring down production data from our production system and put it into our dev and test system so we can test functionality as we're, as it's changing and coming on in flight and so forth.
Todd Smoak [00:20:08]:
And so we call that refreshing, right? How do you refresh the non prod environments? And now that's a click of a button. We can click the button, ERPA can click the button. It's just, it's like, hey, we're doing this. We do it on a schedule. Few clicks, the environment comes up, we run some of our own scripts and other things on that on top of it super fast. Never been more pleased with how that just works.
Todd Smoak [00:20:28]:
We run those things, you know, over the weekend. No one has to monitor them. We come in on Monday morning, we basically do what we call an environment checkout. We run a short checklist, make sure everything looks good, call up the users and say, hey, my environment's back up. You probably didn't notice that it was down yet. You probably weren't even using it because it was over the weekend. It was a test environment, right?
Todd Smoak [00:20:47]:
But being able to put that level of automation in play for the team is really makes us really efficient. And that is definitely something that we really wanted to get out of modernization in that space. And we have it today and we're very thankful for it.
Jeff Miller [00:21:03]:
Isn't it fun to be impressed by technology when you find that resizing is really a 30 minute conversation and then it's done? Voila. And the same with the refresh that it's really a click of a button and it's done. It's a new world when you have that kind of convenience at your fingertips when you're dealing with such a robust system.
Todd Smoak [00:21:22]:
Yeah, I mean, when you haven't done it before, but you know, like in theory this should be possible, like it should be scriptable. Why isn't this more automated? Why isn't this easier? Why is someone saying it takes so long? What's broken about that process? Right. And then when you see it on the flip side, where you're like, no, it is possible. There it is. And you realize that, yeah, this is exactly what we've been missing or what we were hoping to get by continuing our journey in this modernization. And this is where we want to be because that is what we're envisioning. Like what, what would it look like? An ideal situation? What would look like? I said, like, someone called and we decided that we need to refresh our test environment. So I clicked the button and said, it'll be done in 30 minutes or an hour, whenever you need it.
Todd Smoak [00:22:02]:
And is that going to be soon enough? And they go, yeah, I wanted it by next week. And you're like, it's done now already. Let's. Those convers you don't have to have spend time having, right? And now you can be like, yeah, we need to do an extra one. What's. Can we do an extra one? Yeah, sure. It doesn't take that much more time to do an extra one.
Todd Smoak [00:22:18]:
I know we have. We keep a schedule because it's easy to plan around a schedule. But sometimes things come up if something comes up and we need to get into it, like financial aid this year, right? All kinds of things come up with that. We need to test some more stuff. Great, no problem. We'll get that data ready for you.
Todd Smoak [00:22:34]:
Get it ready to go.
Jeff Miller [00:22:36]:
So we talked about ERPA and Illinois State University partnering together related to the managed services for PeopleSoft on AWS. Can you help me understand how that has helped Illinois State University with staffing challenges as well as application optimization challenges?
Todd Smoak [00:22:54]:
So, I mean, we knew, and we, that hiring enough talented resources for this environment was going to be tough based on the environment externally to ISU that we talked about. And we also know that getting skilled resources who have both the knowledge of the infrastructure that we're trying to build as well as the specific applications that we're trying to run. There is some specific knowledge required to be successful at that. If you look at the PeopleSoft manuals, none of them are short. They're all 800 to a thousand pages and there's like more than a dozen of them. Okay. So running these tools, it's complicated and you need experience to do that. There aren't enough people in the world, I think, to be able to do that.
Todd Smoak [00:23:38]:
And everyone have their own pool of experts. So you have to go to where there's economies of scale, like an ERPA who's already doing it, who already has a talent pool. They know where they need to staff up in different places. And so they were able to leverage the staffing they had as well as ramp it up with already an onboarding program and a training program that would make it easier for them to add to our needs and, and focus on those, but also leverage all the automations that they had in their back pocket. I think to, you know, yeah, we're going to apply all these things for you just like we do for these other folks and it's going to work for you. And so they could take the burden of us having to manage staffing, specifically issues and could focus on the delivery of the environment, whereas we could focus on our delivery of value add. Like how do we add value? How do we make sure our universe is getting the most of the tools that we have? And so that kind of changed our focus right into that value add into the. Our team is focused on leveraging the tool and not so much managing the infrastructure and the behind the scenes and the day to day and keeping up on things other than keeping coordination with a schedule and the, you know, environment and feedback and so forth to our partnership, which is what it is.
Todd Smoak [00:24:53]:
It's really, to me, ERPA is an extension of our team and we work like a big team together, right? So like we're on teams chat. If there's ever an issue, it's hey, you know, says admin on the other side, like we're seeing this. Are you seeing this? This is what we've got. Or we, we have some users experiencing something here, an error message, something has happened, let's get together. And it is a bigger team space. It is not a hey, recorded message. Leave a message, we'll get back to you.
Todd Smoak [00:25:22]:
And it's not a. Okay, let me talk to you about why is this really important? Are you sure it's the most important thing that we could be working on for you. We skip all that fluff and go straight to a dedicated team that knows us. They know how we're set up, they know how we work, they know what we expect and we work together to get that done. It was one of the, one of the stories I like to talk about is itil. Like our shop is ITIL certified, a large portion of ITIL Foundation. So we have a very structured approach to IT service management and including how we're tracking incidents, service requests and these things that come into our IT shop. So a little bit more structured and rigid and it's one of those things that we work with ERPA on saying hey, we talk this language, we need you to talk this language back to us.
Todd Smoak [00:26:09]:
And we need to leverage the systems in a way that it flows down for us. And they were like, great, this is good for us too. This actually adds a level of structure that we didn't necessarily have in our space, but we know it's good for us. So we as a group, as now a partnership, we mature together, we evolve together. ERPA comes back and says, hey, we found a way to improve performance and lower costs. Great, let's do that. Let's, you know, hey, how can we leverage in some places, let's say it's offshore resources to do certain kind of work that would be easy for them to do in a lower cost. How can we leverage new infrastructures when AWS, I don't know the technical term, when they release new chipsets, new compute, new horsepower, new storage, and they come with different price models, some of them are even more attractive than what we had before and higher performing.
Todd Smoak [00:26:59]:
Hey, how do we get there? How do we move over these things to keep our costs in line? To keep your costs coming down. It is group think and truly kind of a larger team connected together, which makes it really nice for us. And that's why this is the best kind of, I think, managed services relationship. Because we feel very in touch with the services that we're getting and that we need and we're able to continue to shape those as we take every day forward, right? It is not set it and forget it. There's too many things going on, too many moving parts and these types of applications to think that we can write the perfect contract and come up with the most perfect relationship, define it on paper and execute an agreement and walk away. No, it's a constant back and forth and we needed that and we needed someone who was willing to also be like, yes, we recognize that this is a moving obstacle with the goal of customer service in the end, not just back to us, isu, the customer, but to our constituents.
Todd Smoak [00:28:00]:
Our services is to the constituents. If the constituents aren't happy, then we're not providing a good service. And it doesn't really matter what external relationship we go to get because at the end of the day we're the ones who get the blame when we can try to point fingers. But that doesn't really do you much good at the end of the day.
Jeff Miller [00:28:16]:
So good. I love the way you describe our partnership and I, I've often used the expression the ERPA has a relational approach to service delivery. And. And you even said it's you're on teams chat with these folks that you feel like they're an extension of your team and what the way you describe it, the language that you use is really how I would define a partnership. And so really appreciate all of that. Todd. So I've got one more question for you. I know you've mentioned to me that you feel like that you're really maximizing and optimizing PeopleSoft now that you're on AWS.
Jeff Miller [00:28:50]:
I mean, you seem like you're in a really good place, and I know that's something that all of our listeners are interested in finally achieving that. So how do you think you've achieved that and what do you think is the secret sauce to maximizing PeopleSoft on AWS the way that you've been able to do?
Todd Smoak [00:29:10]:
That's a good question. I think you guys brought us a secret sauce. I'd probably say once you have the automation and the management of the infrastructure down and you also create a cadence, that it moves relatively quickly, then that enables you to direct your attention elsewhere. So if you, if you have a cadence and you can trust the cadence and you can trust the stability and you can trust the flow of the constant again, the constant changes of patches, then you can build your processes around. What does it mean? What do we have to do? How do we keep other efforts moving in conjunction, in parallel at the same time? Where do we know that we need to take a pause or not in the work we're doing because somehow the environment is going to threaten that, right? Stability would threaten that. If you had to take long planned outages, those kinds of things where you couldn't make changes and you couldn't do testing and those kinds of things would threaten your ability to move forward quickly. But if you can actually take all those things off the table and go, that's no longer an issue. That's not a concern anymore.
Todd Smoak [00:30:14]:
Then you can move quickly and be like, okay, we understand how this works. We know when we can and can't access the system and we are no longer limited by a rigid schedule or long durations of time where, oh, you can't be using the system during this time because backups have to run or this has to happen. And you know, and so when, when you don't have a lot of those hard obstacles to overcome or restrictions in place, then you can, I think, just turn your attention back to, okay, maximize the use of the tool. Every feature in the tool. We're paying for every feature of the tool. Let's make sure we're using every feature, the tools we have. And if we're not, we should be able to speak to those areas and go, why aren't we? That is where our energy gets spent now. It gets spent diving into, hey, we're trying to solve a problem.
Todd Smoak [00:31:01]:
Hey, there's another feature we're not using. Let's use that. There's a new feature that looks better, it looks improved, the interface is better. Can we. How do we switch to that? How do we get on those new. You know, because sometimes the vendor is bringing that more than we can consume quickly, right? Because we have to have our university operations adjust and change and that takes time because you have to teach the staff and the students, hey, it's different now and how do we adapt? And so because we can keep a, a little bit more constant, I think change happening in that space too.
Todd Smoak [00:31:32]:
Everyone, again, they get it, they understand it better. It's smaller bites of change as we're going through it, but in maybe a more frequent basis. But they're still more comfortable with that and they've seen it go really smoothly for the last few years and that has really made it again to let everyone else, ah, we're not worried about this space. We have this space really well managed and really not a concern for the university. So we can turn our attentions toward how do we create and continue to increase overall operational efficiency, how do we bring in new tools to our spaces that leverage the data, whether it's AI or something else, to again focus the attention on how we can control overall university spend. How do we get more out of every dollar we're spending on every system we have and make sure they're. They're really working for the university. I think that's what I would say.
Jeff Miller [00:32:20]:
That's good. Yeah. You're in a really good place and a big part of that is because you've had brain space freed up. And then you're also not necessarily worried on a constant basis about the dependability of the infrastructure. So that's really good.
Jeff Miller [00:32:37]:
Thanks for listening to the possibility perspective. If you'd like to talk to ERPA about what's next in your PeopleSoft journey, be sure to visit erpa.com.