Victoria's RMIT University yesterday announced an overhaul of it's troubled Academic Management System (AMS).

The University expects the upgrade to save it $10 million per year. When the original system went live in October 2001, it caused an administrative nightmare, costing the University $47 million -- three times the original project budget. A report released by the Victorian Auditor General in March this year blamed poor communication, ineffective change management, and the lack of "a clearly defined governance structure" as the source of the problems.

Individual issues in the report read like an administrative nightmare. RMIT's general ledger had to be updated manually using "... estimated revenue figures because reliable actual data was not available", and quite often RMIT staff had to revert to manual processes just to get the job done, according to the Auditor General's report.

As of June 2002 tuition calculations were not performed for 5,000 students. The system was so problematic that RMIT International, the subsidiary responsible for managing international students, actually reverted back to the old system shortly after the implementation of the AMS.

According to Allan Morris, RMIT's executive director of IT services, the worst of it is over. The project is heading towards a successful outcome by ditching some of the problematic modifications made to the system, which is based on a PeopleSoft platform, and modifying some administrative practices to suit the system instead of the other way around.

In terms of the root cause of the problem, Morris says the "go live" date was premature -- neither the University's administrative processes nor the technology were robust enough to handle such a large shake-up.

"It was a major technology change ... it was a major change from a business process perspective as well," he told ZDNet Australia . "The change on both fronts was underestimated ... so the system went live at a time when, from a technology perspective, or a business ready perspective, it wasn't ready."

"That compounded problems," he added.

To some extent Morris says the problems faced by RMIT could be traced to a mismatch between what was promised by vendors and what was delivered. It's not an issue specific to one vendor, he says, but an IT industry issue.

"The customer has to be mindful of what the vendor is putting up, and the vendor needs to be mindful of what they're putting up. The IT industry as an industry has a fairly poor track record of people selling things off PowerPoint slides," he said. "In a sales cycle someone will say 'Does the system do this?' and the answer will be 'Yes, it does'. But there's not enough time given to ask 'How is it going to do that?'."

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