SEATTLE — More than three months after the launch of the University of Washington’s $340 million cloud-based finance platform, many faculty, staff and others say the system is still wracked by disruptive bugs and flaws.
While core processes such as tuition, faculty salaries and UW Medicine operations have safely made the shift to the new software, other essential processes at the state’s biggest university remain snarled.
Tens of millions of dollars in payments to university vendors, for everything from Apple computers to catering and video services, have been delayed since the July 6 rollout of Workday, a sophisticated “enterprise” software platform that replaced hundreds of aging UW systems.
The university’s system of research grants, which account for a fifth of UW’s $9.5 billion budget, has also been affected. Some faculty say they’ve been unable to purchase research supplies, or have had to personally cover expenses to keep projects going.
“We’re all told that ‘This is going to get better, don’t worry,’ but it’s reached a stage now where it’s adversely affecting the operations of faculty,” says Arthur Nowell, a UW School of Oceanography professor and the school’s former department chair.
Critics note the bugs come even after the university delayed the launch by a year and boosted its budget by $71 million. They also follow similar problems with a 2017 Workday upgrade for UW’s payroll systems.
University officials insist the UW Finance Transformation, as the five-year project is called, remains on track.
But they acknowledge that key systems, such as procurement and grants, need more work, and they are scrambling to assuage unhappy faculty, vendors and others ensnared by the delays.
“We want to acknowledge it has been frustrating,” Chris Mercer, executive director of the project, said during an interview. “We get it — we get the phone calls, the emails that are coming in — we understand.”
It’s all made for an awkward debut for one of UW’s largest-ever capital projects. It’s also highlighting challenges for the state’s broader move to upgrade its aging IT infrastructure, a nearly $2 billion effort that has struggled with missed deadlines and rising costs as agencies have come to grips with the scale of the task.
In May, the Office of Financial Management, the state’s budget office, announced that the Workday upgrade of the state’s accounting and reporting system, initially expected to launch in 2022 at a cost of $144 million, was pushed back to July 2025, with a cost $284.5 million, according to OFM.
The UW rollout is “almost a symbolic representation of government’s struggle to do really big technical projects like this,” said Reuven Carlyle, a former state senator from Seattle who led an early charge to reform the state’s IT systems.
While there’s little doubt the state’s IT infrastructure needs upgrading, Carlyle says agencies too often fail to do enough planning before greenlighting multimillion-dollar projects. “The challenge is that they want to hire a contractor and start building before they have a sophisticated architectural drawing,” he says.
UW officials acknowledge key missteps in the project. Early design work was marked by tension within university leadership over scope and priorities, said Margaret Shepherd, who oversees the project as UW’s chief administrative officer and chief of staff for UW President Ana Mari Cauce.
Shepherd took over in July after her predecessor, Mark Richards, a geophysicist, retired as university provost.
The university also misjudged the magnitude of the upgrade, which was originally expected to cost $269 million and “go live” in July 2022.
Many of the university’s roughly 800 legacy systems, for everything from expense reporting to budgeting to procurement, were decades old. Until last July, UW was still using the COBOL-based financial accounting system developed in 1974.
In trying to determine which legacy systems would be retired and which would be “remediated,” “we underestimated the size and scale of that activity when we set the budget,” Shepherd said.
In 2021, the project got a major reset. Regents increased the budget by a hefty 26% and postponed the launch date by a year. The university also brought in Mercer, a veteran IT program manager who had run similar projects at other universities. Mercer’s contract, through an outside firm, runs the university $450,000 a year and ends Dec. 31.
Despite the extra funds, time and expertise, the July 6 launch was troubled from the start.
Vendors began complaining about late payments. By mid-August, the backlog had reached $90 million, or around two-thirds of the total amount invoiced since the launch, according to UW officials.
Afflicted vendors included big players such as Apple, which is still owed more than half of the $661,000 invoiced since July, UW officials say.
But problems also hit local businesses, including many of the caterers who handle university events.
Earlier this month, Seattle-based Ravishing Radish Catering had been waiting on a payment of around $5,000 for an event in April, said the caterer’s events director, Taylor Brock. She said a more recent event had been paid on time, “so it’s kind of been hit or miss with them.”
React AV, a Tukwila-based audio-video firm, was owed around $125,000 in past due invoices to UW, KIRO reported this week.
The rollout also appears to be affecting the university’s vast system of grants.
UW officials say there’s no indication the school has lost any grant funding. But some faculty say the rollout has contributed to delays in getting essential paperwork to government grant sponsors, and that some sponsors have warned that funding could be reduced unless the problems are resolved, according to communications shared with The Seattle Times.
Some faculty also say the new system makes it hard to track funds or use them for expenses.
On Friday, Mari Ostendorf, UW vice provost for research, acknowledged the grant difficulties. In an email to faculty that was shared with The Times, Ostendorf noted there are “critical capabilities for research that are not fully functional” under the new Workday system. Although Ostendorf expressed confidence the problems would be addressed, she conceded that “progress has been slower than desired” and noted that the university is “concerned about the potential for unanticipated costs, lost opportunities, audit risks and compliance violations.”
In the meantime, faculty and administrators have responded with patches and workarounds.
The School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences told faculty it would temporarily cover some “time-critical” expenses, including grant-dependent salaries and stipends, and “mission-critical” supplies using other school funds, according to an email from school director Tim Essington that was shared with The Times.
And when Jennie Romich, a professor in the School of Social Work, needed to pay local research collaborators, she ended up sending them cashier’s checks drawn on her personal bank account.
That “is not a great use of a principal investigator’s time, but we want to be a responsible collaborator to folks in the community and that was the fastest way we could do that,” said Romich.
David Kieffer, an analyst at The Tambellini Group, which advises colleges on technology issues, says he’s not surprised about the UW’s grant-related snarls.
Government grants typically come with exacting requirements that universities, departments and individual faculty all have systems to deal with.
Bringing all those intricate relationships into a new IT system “is one of the more complicated things to implement,” says Kieffer. “It can go wrong in any number of ways.”
The problems are likely to bring new scrutiny to the way UW has handled the project. Some faculty have questioned the heavy reliance on outside IT experts, such as Deloitte, or even whether enterprise resource planning software systems like Workday are suitable for organizations as complicated as research universities.
In a statement, Workday notes “400 global higher education organizations” use its products and that it is “committed to working closely with the University of Washington … as it moves over 850 legacy side systems to one centralized system.”
But many faculty seem to think one of the biggest problems is that Workday went “live” before all the complications had been ironed out — or before they’d been trained to use the new system.
Ostendorf acknowledged “that existing training and documentation is lacking, and that it can be hard to get meaningful data reports from Workday,” according to her email.
Many faculty also complain of a shortage of technical support to help deal with bugs.
As a result, faculty turn to their own administrative staff, who “are absolutely overwhelmed,” says Rick Keil, director of the School of Oceanography. Not surprisingly, faculty also say they’re seeing higher turnover of administrative staff, in part over frustration with Workday.
UW officials acknowledge the need for more staff training and more help in adapting business practices to the new system. They are also adding resources for problem areas like grants and procurement, which they hope to have fixed by the end of the year if not sooner.
As of Thursday, the queue of late vendor payments was down to $71 million, or around 11% of eligible invoices received since July 6.
