Re: [MLUG] mlug?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> Jonathan King wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > I doubt that migration to Exchange is anything that MLUG could have
> > influenced given that there was some fairly vocal opposition expressed at
> > the time by some departments and faculty...who in practice do have at
> > least a bit more influence than your average sporadic undergraduate
> > organization.
> 
> Actually I don't think faculty or departments have much
> influence.  Neither do staff it seems.  Had faculty or staff
> been properly involved in the decision, I don't think we would
> have adopted Exchange.

OK, I suspect you're right.  I guess I was having high-minded
thoughts back there a little bit, and those die hard. :-)

> I also think that we would not have adopted PeopleSoft (if you
> speak to secretarial staff on campus, they complain bitterly
> about this new accounting package that has been wholesale forced
> upon the whole university).

PeopleSoft seems to be a disaster, but the pre-existing system was
not anything to brag about, either.  It was a familiar evil, but it
was piece meal and klunky and as far as I could tell you really
couldn't do very much useful with it.  But payroll went off without 
a hitch, so...

I also thought it was very odd that they rolled it out so 
aggressively campus-wide (system-wide?) when there were significant 
questions about how the migration path would go, and some horror 
stories from other campuses that had attempted to switch (Cleveland 
State is one, I think.)

> I am told from speaking to people on the Faculty Council that
> they were not involved with these decisions.

At other universities I've seen Faculty Councils do not have very
much power over decisions like this, but they sometimes *do* have
significant power over hiring and firing of people at the
Provost/Dean/whatever level.  It doesn't look like MU faculty really 
have this.
 
> These decisions all seem to come from the upper adminstration,
> and the way they arrive at their decisions seems mysterious.  
> These are the same people who control the hospital, which
> according to a recent state audit, lost about $12M over 2.5
> years, because they did not file insurance claims in a timely
> manner, or properly preauthorise treatments.

Well, that's a point simultaneously about the weakness of some IT or
business systems in the hospital, and the real chaotic nature of
getting indigent care claims properly filed.  Pre-authorization is
another strange thing; in my HMO, this is the process of getting
"referrals" for basically everything except seeing your own doctor,
and there are so many ways for these to get messed up (I've seen
them all, I think).  More than once I've found myself in a position 
to decide whether to go ahead and "risk it" because a referral that 
should have been in the system wasn't (but could be post-filed and 
would likely go through) or turn on my heel and leave, with the hope 
of getting a new appointment in X months, where X was an integer 
between 1 and 10...

I mean, all of this stuff is bad for your finances, and it has to
stop.  But these weren't like the decision to try and pay specialist
MDs less than the market rate (so that they left for greener
pastures, leaving you with the new expense of recruiting for a
replacement) or buying Columbia Regional without a really clear idea
of why you needed this facility.  (Apparently, they thought that 
Boone would scoop it up if they didn't; now, of course, Boone is 
going to build their own new infrastructure, and Regional looks like
a real white elephant in this market.)

jking


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