A recent state audit of the California State University system's integrated technology system, known as the Common Management System, or CMS, has prompted state legislators to question the need for the project, its benefits and its implementation cost.

Citizens might be forgiven for assuming the worst. State agencies have a less-than-stellar record of technology procurement and implementation. The CSU system, however, has gotten a bum rap.

CMS was clearly needed, competitively awarded and is being successfully implemented within about 10 percent of the original estimated budget. The need for an integrated information system was glaring in the 1990s. CSU's many campuses were operating on various obsolete or discarded technology systems. CSU was looking at the real possibility of having to suffer ongoing failures at some campuses unless action was taken.

CSU embarked on years of analysis and evaluation to identify new technology options to best serve students, staff and faculty in the coming decades, and from this process developed a series of competitive bids for software, hardware and implementation.

In its 1999 estimate, CSU projected $439 million in new costs, which is what the original purchase and implementation estimate was based on. If ongoing costs were added, the total rose to $542 million. These ongoing costs, which would have been necessary to operate the old systems, were never considered part of the original costs, as they were not new costs. However, the auditor put these costs in her total, plus added $63 million more for existing staff costs that would have occurred without CMS.

This is why CSU's cost of $542 million is lower than the auditor's, and why there has been significant disagreement over figures. CSU is correct to stand by its $542 million estimate over the seven-year implementation period.

These key facts have been overwhelmed by the auditor's cost estimate of $662 million. This is what has given some legislators and other critics a platform to label the CMS project a "gross cost overrun," but it is simply misleading at best. New costs are what were projected because they are what immediately impact the university's budget.

In the long run, what really matters is how well the CSU system, the largest public university in the nation, is serving students.

Today, for the first time, students attending CSU campuses with the CMS student module can register, seek financial aid, monitor academic progress and obtain grades online in minutes instead of standing in long lines or retrieving, mailing and waiting for financial aid applications to be processed.

Had CSU not acted to implement CMS when it did, it is quite likely that the state auditor and legislators would be busy today criticizing CSU's outdated and failing delivery of basic student services by attempting to prop up a patchwork of obsolete systems.

Of course any large information technology implementation faces challenges, and one on the scale of CMS -- designed to serve the university's 408,000 students and 45,000 faculty and staff -- is no exception. The CSU's procurement process could have been better managed, as the auditor pointed out. The chancellor has begun implementing all 30 of the auditor's recommendations and will report publicly on the progress.

But any shortcomings primarily relate to the process, not the need for CMS, its benefits to students or its cost. On those counts, CSU has put itself on a track to success.

The public employee unions and their legislative allies continue to slam CSU's leaders, mischaracterizing the CMS project as another Oracle. But this is no Oracle. It's time to move on.

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Bill Hauck is a member of the California State University board of trustees and chairman of the Finance Committee. He also is president of the California Business Roundtable. He can be reached at bhauck@cbrt.org. Web site: www.calstate.org.