Too many eggs in one basket

Career Services' problems are instructive for other penn departments looking to implement new technology. Career Services' problems are instructive for other penn departments looking to implement new technology.If there is one certainty in this electronic age, it is that new systems crash, early and often. Unfortunately, Career Services seems to have been ill-prepared for the possibility of a crash. Instead, because no back-up system was in place, Career Services has been forced to rely series of extensions and a return to dropping resumes off the old-fashioned way -- by hand at the office -- to ensure that students are not punished in the long term for the system's failures. But over the summer, vendor Crimson Solutions made several changes to the program -- changes Patricia Rose, the director of Career Services, believes have caused the current spate of problems. At the very least, the possibility that such problems could arise should have been apparent. Career Services' own history should also have served as a warning beacon: the 1998 roll-out of Fortune -- the in-house system used by students to schedule interviews and get career information -- was also plagued in early use by a host of bugs and crashes. The lesson here is simple: even the most beneficial of technologies will not work perfectly from day one. That is no reason to shy away from new technologies, but it is more than ample reason to ensure that a system works before becoming totally reliant on its services. It is a lesson we hope both Career Services and other Penn departments will heed in the future.

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