Allegheny unveiled Oracle, its new enterprise system, this winter in a move to update software supporting the college’s finance, human resources and grant management operations. The platform switch followed nearly three decades of business with the software company Ellucian.

“It definitely is not an IT project,” said Chief Information Officer Katrina Yeung in an interview with The Campus.

“We were heavy in it, but it really is a business process, and we want to make sure that we acknowledge all of the efforts put in by everybody.”

Allegheny’s Oracle Support Website — a resource accessible through GatorHub’s Oracle Cloud widget — named 20 college administrators who coordinated the transition, including in offices like Financial Services, Human Resources, Student Employment, Foundation and Corporate Relations, the Provost’s Office and Information and Technology Systems. Launch preparation entailed months of design sessions, data validation and end-to-end testing, according to a Nov. 19, 2025, press release from Yeung.

Assistant Director of Enterprise Systems Molly Smith, ’12, highlighted the importance of communication while creating new digital systems for Human Resources, Finance and Grant Management.

“All the business offices have to communicate, and that is something that we’ve tried to foster in the project management process as we’ve gone forward in this year-long implementation,” Smith said.

According to the press release, the switch was motivated by technological limitations within the college’s former enterprise system, Elucian Colleague. Oracle’s modern features, by contrast, are suited to deliver on Goal 5 of Allegheny’s Strategic Pathway: Operational and Financial Sustainability. The new software will affect college functions as wide-ranging as hiring, employee onboarding, attendance tracking, purchasing, accounting and grant project management.

“I’ve supported our HR system for a while, and something that we’ve struggled with our legacy system is point-in-time reporting,” Smith said. “I can pretty much get you what the picture is today, but if you ever ask me what did it look like six months ago, it’s doable but not at-the-click-of-a-button easy, and in Oracle it really is. I can pick a date and time and tell you exactly what the state of HR looks like exactly at that time, so that’s nice.”

Yeung stressed the utility of real-time insights while speaking of the analytical tools the new software offers. Yeung’s press release stated that Allegheny students can expect the launch of Oracle’s Student Information System in 2028.

“As we connect it into the Student Information System,” Yeung said, “we can start to slice and dice student data a lot more granularly than we can now.”

Additionally, Yeung and Smith agreed that factors of price, functionality and longevity were central criteria influencing the decision. Among three candidate platforms — a Software as a Service platform, Workday and Oracle — Oracle beat the competition on all fronts.

“Oracle invests somewhere around 6.8 billion-with-a-B dollars annually on R&D, Workday is just over 2 billion and then Ellucian, our current product, was well below that, and so that was a big factor,” Yeung said.

Platform price, according to Yeung, was largely determined by Allegheny’s membership within the Higher Education Systems and Services Collective. The HESS Consortium website states that the collective consists of 514 private nonprofit colleges and universities across the United States. DriveStream, another player in Allegheny’s platform switch, is a private company specializing in the implementation of Oracle products at HESS institutions.

“DriveStream and HESS have a partnership, and they negotiated really favorable pricing with Oracle,” Yeung said. “If we didn’t have the HESS Collective and the DriveStream partnership, I don’t know that we could afford to have gone with Oracle. It truly was that partnership of all the parties that have enabled us to reach this point.”

The launch of Allegheny’s new Oracle software for Finance and Grant Management preceded recent national news coverage following the tech giant. On Jan. 22, Politico reported that Oracle spent $14 billion in a deal to acquire a 15% stake in the social media platform TikTok. This Monday, Feb. 2, Reuters reported that Oracle announced plans the previous day to raise $50 billion in 2026 to fund the construction of data processing centers necessary for powering the company’s artificial intelligence technologies.

As for Allegheny’s new enterprise system, artificial intelligence is off the table for now.

“For today, we do not have any of the AI tooling turned on in the application as it stands,” Yeung said. “We’re looking at what potential ways make sense to leverage the AI tools that they have available. How it will interact with the Student Information System, I think it’s too early to tell, so I’m going to put a pin in that one, and we need to see how it plays out longer term.”

Yeung’s press release stated that students should expect academic records, advising, billing, financial aid and registration to change down the line.

“As we progress through Oracle, really in ’28 is when students will be able to start looking and touching and feeling Oracle in more tangible ways,” Yeung said. “And so it’s how do I register for a class? Where do I see what classes are available next semester?”

For assistance navigating new HR, Finance, and Grant Management configurations, Allegheny students can review training materials accessible on the Oracle Support website through GatorHub.