1. Should Stanford simply have started fresh, rather than spending seven years trying to install oracle financial modules?

- Stanford should have tried to transfer the financial units which were of relevance for that point of time, rather than try to do it for all its 20 years stuff. It could have done that slowly at a later stage
-  Apart from above, if they had done it freshly it would have been better (at least they should have done it after they saw the delay in the transfers and at the later part it could helped them to overcome the pain of delays and budget overruns that accompany complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

2. Should Stanford have investigated other universities with EPR system before beginning its implementation?

-  Yes, it should have checked with other universities then it would have known the problems they had and which may help them to decide whether to start fresh system or not
-   Also they should have looked into other available software providers than only these two (Oracle and PeopleSoft ) which might helped them to reduce pain of delays and budget overruns that accompany complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

3. Should Stanford have had to pay for the difficulties in implementing the oracle and peopleSoft system? Should oracle and peoplesoft have borne part of the costs?

- The delay has been caused in part by Oracle itself, which helped Stanford customize the software so heavily—changing Oracle Financials to accommodate the way Stanford, so Stanford need to redistributes overhead costs across its grants.
- Equal part should be paid for both Oracle and Peoplesoft because for instance- together they broke continuity with future versions of the software, rendering portions of what they put in place unusable ("version upgrade gridlock"—installing new Oracle version requires changing PeopleSoft version, upgrading to PeopleSoft version requires changing Oracle version, and so on.).

I like to have this below statement it tells Stress faced by the Stanford that time 
"Sometimes I look back and wonder if this wave of ERP software … wasn't a collective hallucination," says Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999."

- Janardhan C
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