By Colleen Miller

Copy Editor

There’s an electronic hum among some faculty at Oakland University. The buzz is about how long it is taking to get software approved by the administration.

Andrea Eis, chairperson of the art and art history department, said she is working on ordering new software and will be moving ahead faster than she used to, expecting to wait.

“I heard it was taking as long as six months,” Eis said.

Dr. Cathy Cheal, the assistant vice president of e-learning and IT instruction, waited several months for Adobe Creative Suite 3.

“We ended up getting CS4, so actually it turned out to be beneficial for us,” Cheal said.

The longer waiting period is due to a change in procedure that now involves the office of the general counsel in virtually every decision, especially decisions about software.

“When we used to order software licenses, we would do that on our own through a regular company, apparently a new procedure is in place,” Eis said.

OU’s media relations director Ted Montgomery said that although the university’s underlying contracting policies have not changed, the process for reviewing them and the responsibility for approving them has changed.

“All software contracts are now reviewed by both IT [information technology] and by the legal office and must be approved by the legal office,” he said.

Theresa Rowe, OU’s chief information officer, also said that there is no new written policy or procedure.

“There is a documented university purchasing process, that’s not new,” Rowe said. The purpose of having software contracts reviewed is to “make sure that the vendor is held accountable” and if there is a licensing agreement involved, the university is protected.

Rowe also said that if there is a copyright involved, there is a need to check that the company actually has the copyright for the software they are licensing.

The purpose is to “make sure that any agreement reflects the best interest of the university,” Rowe said.

“There really isn’t any set time [for processing], it depends on what issues are in the agreement,” Cheal said. “A lot of it depends on the variables, what the policy is, who the company is, how many people on campus are looking to get that same software.

“It has made things slower. I think that will change as they go through the various contracts and the software is purchased and they’ve had experience with it,” Cheal said.

“Now Adobe for example, they know what the issues are.”

A wait of several months could mean that some students won’t get to learn on the latest version of software. “Every procedure on campus affects students,  that’s a given,” Cheal said.

The administration has not put out a statement about the new policy and the office of the general counsel would not comment directly to The Oakland Post. Unless a department has recently requested software, the faculty wouldn’t know about the procedural change.

Scott Barns, executive director of the American Association of University Professors, said that he has not heard about any problems with purchasing. But if any arise, now is the time to address concerns.

The AAUP will start bargaining for next year soon. They will start meeting with the departments this winter and will meet with the administration about faculty concerns in May to discuss the next contracts.

Montgomery said that the “university subscribes to a lean philosophy.” There has been an ongoing initiative to streamline procedures.

Cheal said she has been on a lean committee for the university before.

“We do that all the time, it’s just running a university is so enormously complex,” Cheal said. She said some processes can be made leaner and some can’t. “What’s amazing to me is how well things run in spite of how complex it all is.”