[HN Gopher] CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
Author : jer0me
Score : 253 points
Date : 2024-09-18 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pscbc.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pscbc.blogspot.com)
| jer0me wrote:
| @dang -- I found a better link which appears to be a revised
| version of the current one: https://psc-
| cuny.org/clarion/2013/may/cunyfirst-users-last/
|
| ---
|
| This is a post by Prof. David Arnow on the blog of the Brooklyn
| College's professors' union about CUNYfirst, a PeopleSoft-based
| course registration and HR system sold by Oracle. Posting because
| the system recently got some attention on Twitter:
| https://x.com/ChocolateyCrepe/status/1836171439965446441
| santoshalper wrote:
| Every time something comes up, this is how I explain it to
| people:
|
| "Why Enterprise Software Sucks"
| https://x.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776?lang=...
| tverbeure wrote:
| The baby clothes analogy is perfect!
|
| And it works just the same for Workday and ServiceNow
| applications. And TV remote controls...
| santoshalper wrote:
| Don't forget Salesforce!
| pell wrote:
| Here is the unrolled tweet for those without an active account:
|
| https://unrollnow.com/status/1182635589604171776
| stackskipton wrote:
| You the real MVP. I wish Twitter users would understand how
| awful the platform is for someone without an account.
| Shorel wrote:
| I have an account and I think Twitter is extremely awful.
|
| I never post anything, I just have the account to open
| links people sent me.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| here's the prior HN post about that tweet:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is why I never, ever, buy or recommend software without
| actually using it along with the people who'll be dealing with
| it everyday. "Oh, devs will have to install it on their
| laptops? Ok! I'm a dev. Send me a test license and I'll see
| what it's like."
|
| I've made mistakes, sure, but I'm proud to say I've never
| signed off on anything I wouldn't be personally willing to
| endure.
| pphysch wrote:
| In brief, administrators are tunnel-visioned on checking boxes
| without being mindful of the fact that if you only need 1% of
| the features, the other 99% represents unnecessary complexity
| that will directly impact the usability and maintainability of
| the "solution".
| JCM9 wrote:
| When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators
| are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no
| surprise the academic sector is in such a mess at the moment.
| Sadly this whole mess is funded by debt handed out that's not
| dischargeable in bankruptcy for degrees of highly questionable
| value. It's really sad when you follow the money and think about
| who and how stuff like this is actually paid for.
|
| The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify
| that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.
| panzagl wrote:
| This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators'
| fault- this is being imposed by the state university system.
| Reading between the lines the change is a response to political
| pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
| kkylin wrote:
| I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY).
| Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little
| direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come
| down from central admin, through a process that is just as
| mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
| Loughla wrote:
| I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple
| large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and
| faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the
| university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest
| of us.
|
| Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT
| and central admin if software purchases were requested.
| These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives
| without a Dean level or above pushing for it.
| itishappy wrote:
| Nit: SUNY and CUNY are surprisingly unrelated.
|
| I had to look it up, and I live upstate.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I don't think people that criticize non-admin university
| employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do
| they not talk to the people that do the work to find out
| what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage
| they've cobbled together after they put it in production,
| and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and
| students are always wrong and they're always right. I could
| write a book about the things I've seen.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Reading between the lines the change is a response to
| political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on
| curricula.
|
| Reduce costs by spending huge amounts of money to lose
| capability? This smells like someone got an "incentive" to
| spend public (govt) money on some corporate project. Not sure
| why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula, but
| that'd be a kind of separate thing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on
| curricula
|
| I won't get too political, but that's the one part of this
| story that only got worse and more blatant over the decade
| since this posting.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| When you see how badly most business administrators are at
| actually running things from a business standpoint it no
| surprise the business sector is in such a mess at the moment.
| dpe82 wrote:
| And yet academia manages to be worse.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Citation?
| api wrote:
| If you've ever worked in a large corporation or government,
| you know that this is the norm. It's amazing that anything,
| anywhere, ever gets done at all in organizations larger than
| a few hundred people.
|
| We as humans are very bad at this.
|
| Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts
| at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional
| organizations.
| jer0me wrote:
| Are they themselves large, dysfunctional organizations?
| m11a wrote:
| > Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are
| experts at extracting large sums of money from large
| dysfunctional organizations.
|
| I wonder, how do they do it? How do they sell sub-par
| products/services that a company arguably doesn't need at a
| premium price?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Lot of people don't care about spending someone else's
| money efficiently. And in some cases spending more will
| make them look better and lead to better opportunities.
| And this happens on every level, lot of employees just
| don't care. And those that might probably focus on wrong
| things.
|
| And no software people are no better, going for expensive
| tools, expensive cloud spending or just next shiny thing
| is often argued with some time to market or future
| scaling excuse. Or just wanting to do something
| different.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| I've worked in academia. I've worked in small, medium and
| large private companies and fortune 50 companies, and I've
| worked for small and large govt.
|
| I have yet to see anything bigger than a small company run
| efficiently, and that's by necessity more than anything.
| The largest wastes of money I've seen were fortune 50/large
| enterprise companies yet people constantly point to gov and
| academia as the most wasteful.
|
| My current job is a cycle of hype waves the executives and
| ceo buy into and oversell to customers in impossible
| timelines, the inevitable smack of reality when neither CEO
| nor customers are happy with the over-promised and under-
| delivered results, and the move to the next wave to capture
| more customers to replace the ones attriting because the
| result doesn't match the requirements despite waht they
| were told.
|
| The actual users of our product seem to split fairly evenly
| on love or hate our products with good reasons while their
| executives and spending managers are almost comically
| willing to fork over more money over for little to no real
| benefits. There is very much "No one was fired for buying
| IBM" mentality in the corporate world, this seems like
| another example.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I've worked in a large government organization (the IRS)
| and at a large tech company.
|
| I think it is fun to pretend like the issues in private
| industry vs public sector are similar in magnitude, but in
| reality it's not even close. I have never seen even
| _remotely_ the level of dysfunction I saw in the public
| sphere in any private company.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Based on your comment, you've worked in 1 public and 1
| private organization. Not sure this is the basis for
| coming to such sweeping and drastic conclusions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| We're all working from limited examples - this entire
| article is about only one. I know many other government
| workers in different branches who felt similarly.
| jajko wrote:
| Ineffective corporation will eventually be driven under the
| ground by various forces, protected businesses have 0
| pressure for quality and effectiveness, so unsurprisingly
| there is little to none.
|
| Anybody who dealt with good amounts of state bureaucrats can
| see this rule in plain sight. Bonus points if you actually
| know some privately. Then they have the balls to want same
| lifestyle as somebody working hard on themselves and their
| careers, doing sacrifices they wouldn't even dream of
| accepting. Of course success never materializes, that evil
| capitalist world is against them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm sorry but having worked in private and public sector,
| there just really isn't any competition in terms of
| incompetence.
|
| If you're not exposed to market forces....
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Why does no one on the inside even seem to acknoledge is
| publicly (I've seen enough internal discussions in the
| private sector to know they do complain on the inside)? Let
| alone try to fix the dysfunction? Does someone high up have
| perverse incentive or are simply too conservative to risk
| chipping away at the problem?
| etempleton wrote:
| I have found that most academics have zero interest in how the
| sausage is made. In fact, I would say there is a willful
| ignorance to understanding the intricacies and complexities of
| what it takes to run a University system and the precarious
| financial realities of most colleges and universities.
|
| However, every once in a while an academic decides to take on
| administrative responsibilities to fix all of the things they
| perceive as broken or to show everyone how smart / right they
| are. Usually the first year for them is incredibly difficult
| for them and everyone around them and they make a true and
| terrible mess of it. At this point, after a full year, they
| usually know just enough to realize how little they know about
| running a college, managing people, or generally being a
| leader. They then react in one of three ways:
|
| 1. Resign from their admin job and go back to just teaching as
| if nothing happened
|
| 2. Become humble and begin actually collaborating with people
| and not blaming everyone for every thing that isn't as they see
| it.
|
| 3. Double down and truly blow everything up until they are
| either fired or whatever it is they are running collapses in on
| itself.
|
| This isn't everyone. The faculty who transition best to
| leadership tend to be pretty humble to begin with.
| nfw2 wrote:
| I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount
| of inefficiency in the organization is insane.
|
| As part of my off-boarding, the lead engineer mentioned she
| would ideally like to hire 5 more developers to the team. That
| would bring the team size up to 15 (8 devs, 2 devops, 2 Ux, 1
| graphic designer, 1 pm, 1 eng manager). The team maintains two
| things:
|
| - The static website for the library
|
| - A pretty basic image server and viewer for the library and
| museum collections
|
| Sure, the library needs a website, but that shouldn't require
| more than a person or two to maintain. The image viewer was
| only used by a handful of people.
|
| But it doesn't matter. The team gets funded because the
| students will keep paying their tuition. The engineers can keep
| sitting around watching youtube all day and the world keeps
| turning.
|
| Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my
| manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER
| X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing
| to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones
| who have been around the longest.
|
| That said, it's risky to fire anybody because hiring is so
| difficult. The salary bands are set at the university level for
| all employees, which means the maximum a software engineer can
| make is much lower than market rate. To make matters worse,
| working "in person" is mandated by the library dean, and the
| university is in a college town in the middle of nowhere. The
| interview process also includes NO coding sessions although I'm
| not sure whether that's due to some corporate process or just
| incompetence.
|
| To be fair, these sorts of issues aren't exclusive to academia,
| and I've seen similar issues in large organizations. Somewhat
| paradoxically, the more bullet-proof the business-model is, the
| more potential there is for rot to grow in a company.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| They hiring?
| loopdoend wrote:
| I'd love to get a job like this seems amazing. Imagine all
| the gold plating you'd get to do. All the experiments and
| optimizations. You'd have the best library website ever.
|
| Imagine the job security.
| nfw2 wrote:
| When you're on a team with 15 people, that means a lot of
| process to push through to get anything done. One of the
| other engineers was the owner for analytics, and as a
| result we had basically no analytics. Furthermore, the team
| lead would often say things like "developers aren't
| designers and shouldn't be thinking about the product". I
| wanted to implement a basic semantic search to help people
| find the resources they were looking for (#1 pain point
| from talking to people), but that was shut down at every
| turn.
|
| There actually was talk of firing someone once, but the
| reason was he didn't always arrive at the office at 9am
| sharp, and wasn't in any way related to his output.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The university I was at had this amazing process for internal
| billing. Everything cost heaps and required entry in an arcane
| system. If you could do something inhouse, you were supposed
| to, either though the cost was astronomical. A $100k bit of
| software from an extra vendor was definitely $200k+ once the
| various IT departments (there were at least 4) had done their
| bit. There were managers all the way down and all were very
| important.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I find it really hard to justify spending $600M on a system like
| that? Look, if you had 500 skilled FTEs working on the project
| for 2 years, at $250K per FTE, that would be a total cost of
| $250M. Say 50 FTEs for ongoing support at $12.5M/year or $125M
| for 10 years. So $375M.
|
| But the above numbers are hugely generous. This is not building
| an ERP from scratch. Do you really think it would take 500 people
| (say 400 engineers and 100 non-engineers), to build and deploy
| such a system? I would imagine you could get it done (and done
| right) with half that many, or less.
|
| Anyway, just mind-blowing.
| newsclues wrote:
| It might be reasonable, if it was quality software. But it is
| crap.
|
| Governments should unite to create basic open source software
| and then individual organizations can tailor it to their needs.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It is a partisan fight for the government to build and offer
| tax software. Huge uphill battle to build out infrastructure
| code projects.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Governments aren't able to manage their way out of a wet
| paper bag unless it threatens their existence.
| neffy wrote:
| And yet 90% of all startups fail, which could also be seen
| as a indicating a certain level of incompetence in the
| private sector.
|
| Consider perhaps that incompetence is distributed across
| the economy, and government and private industry share in
| that, with successful and unsuccessful projects as a
| consequence.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Governments can print themselves a bigger budget.
| Startups can't.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The trick is the find some way that a vendor can monetize it.
| Sometimes you have management consulting groups building
| crappy unmaintained (except by them, if you extend the
| contract) OSS.
|
| One thing that seems to work, sometimes, is having cloud
| vendor support. Could you support maintenance of an OSS
| platform that AWS (and/or their competitors) operates - that
| way AWS could "win" the contract, but the OSS system gets
| funded with a core team and various groups still contribute
| to make it better
| coliveira wrote:
| Governments are controlled by rich people's interest. Of
| course they are lobbied to death to avoid any such kind of
| solution.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Bribery isn't control. It's just bribery.
| coliveira wrote:
| Direct or indirect, it doesn't matter. It is a strong
| form of control.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Pretending it is impossible to get a semi-democratic
| government to work for the people instead of just very
| difficult is defeatism. In fact, getting people to
| believe "It's hopeless" is a big part of the way bad
| governments maintain control of people, like in Russia or
| in the USA
| coliveira wrote:
| I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm only talking about
| the situation in the US. Currently it is dominated by the
| billionaire tech and financial oligarchs and we need to
| do something to change it. It doesn't make any good to
| sugarcoat this reality.
| l72 wrote:
| I agree. Any tax payer money used for creating software
| should be required to be open source. Ideally, governments
| and similar organizations would utilize open source software,
| then use contractors to modify, support, and maintain it
| (again, releasing any changes as open source).
|
| Contractors would then be responsible for providing excellent
| support, not some huge bloated product.
| panzagl wrote:
| IF you go to a body shop to get a dent pulled, you will receive
| one quote. If you tell them insurance is paying you will
| receive a second, much higher, quote.
|
| The dealer will say it's because the insurance company is such
| a hassle to deal with that they have to dedicate employee time
| to jumping through hoops to get paid. The insurance company
| will say the quote is higher because the dealer sees the
| insurance company as a big bag of money and if the insurance
| company doesn't ride them then prices of insurance will go up.
|
| Dealing with government is this times a thousand.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| Your analogy is somewhat backwards. Insurance companies
| squeeze body shops pretty well. If you go in there and ask
| for the same work you will pay more.
|
| The real difference is that often times a person will just
| say make it look okay and I'll be fine. Whereas insurance
| work is basically making a car good as new because that is
| legally required. If you try to get the same level of service
| at retail you will pay more.
| panzagl wrote:
| Interesting. I've been lucky in that I haven't had non-
| cosmetic damage repaired, but it always seemed like there
| were several iterations when insurance was involved.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| There are tons of body shops that won't even take
| insurance work because of the low pay and somewhat low
| standards of work as well.
| stackskipton wrote:
| With Oracle? 400 Engineers is likely way to high, it's more
| like 100 Engineers and 900 non-engineers. Oracle likes to throw
| in a ton of people into contracts with lie that they will
| provide "white glove" teaching and various other things.
| nfw2 wrote:
| I would say you probably could get it done with 5 people (1%
| not 50%)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Maybe not 5, but fewer than 50, yes, even with
| QA/testing/deployment. So long as they're skilled.
| nfw2 wrote:
| 5 is a stretch for sure, but Retool, for example, grew to a
| 9 figure valuation with 2 engineers, and AI is now a big
| boost to developer velocity.
| Salgat wrote:
| Regarding the other bidders dropping out, what exactly was the
| primary expense that gave it an estimated $1B total cost? $600M
| can build out a greenfield software platform, so there must be
| more to it.
| textlapse wrote:
| A $600M Anti-Chesterton Fence that nobody knows why it's there
| and everyone's scared to touch.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'm generally a Hanlon's razor advocate. Never attribute to
| malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
|
| With that said this example strains even my ability to justify
| the incompetence angle.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Hanlon's razor is significantly dulled by the presence of Larry
| Ellison.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is
| indistinguishable from malice."
| pphysch wrote:
| Probably a kernel of malice (corruption, kickbacks) surrounded
| by a warm flesh of incompetence.
| gregw2 wrote:
| Perhaps I can help... when Hanlon's Razor doesn't explain the
| malice/stupidity in play, you can always try the extending it
| with the following:
|
| Hubbard's corollary to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to
| malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately
| rational individuals following incentives in a complex system".
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor#Other_variati..
| .
|
| Or HN Nerdponx's simplification: "When money is at stake, never
| attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed."
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066724)
| zitrussaft wrote:
| UOH!
| Xelbair wrote:
| crying emoji
| pje wrote:
| Bryan Cantrill's rant about Oracle for those who haven't seen it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s
|
| > There has been no entity in human history with less complexity
| or nuance to it than Oracle. [...] This company is about one man,
| his ego, and what he wants to inflict on humanity. That's it.
| passion__desire wrote:
| With that money, Larry begged Jensen to take it and deliver him
| the GPUs. Onto the new grift. In yesteryears it was database
| and now it is AI. Benedict Evans always compared AI to
| databases. Oracle of AI is THE Oracle of Databases.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's worth remembering that Oracle bought Cerner, a major EMR
| vendor, and that they plan to rewrite Cerner Millennium (the
| EMR) using AI.
|
| Enjoy your hospital stay.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| And about society's willingness to tolerate such a man.
| lvl155 wrote:
| How else do you expect Larry to afford control over surveillance
| state?
| kcb wrote:
| I worked in IT at a CUNY school at the time. Just hilariously
| poor and unintuitive. Every student was given an Employee ID
| number. Course registration was basically handled by an
| e-commerce addon.
| elcritch wrote:
| Sounds better than a $600M solution to me.
| nathancahill wrote:
| This was the $600M solution..
| xmprt wrote:
| That was the $600M solution...
| busterarm wrote:
| Sure beats what SUNY was doing a decade earlier. Your student
| ID number was your SSI and it was printed on your ID along with
| your name and picture.
|
| IDs were often lost and stolen.
| lo_fye wrote:
| Pro Tip: If they're willing to sell it, you don't want it.
| db48x wrote:
| Wow, if I'd known about that contract I'd have bid $500 million.
| I could hire some folks and get that done.
| gkoberger wrote:
| A bunch of years ago, at college, I built a class management
| platform for my university. It won me $1k (which was an insane
| amount of money to college me), and I met with president of the
| univeristy to pitch him on using it. They were potentially buying
| Oracle software, and I found myself up against them. At the time,
| I felt like this professor.
|
| They obviously went with Oracle. I'm sure they spent a ton of
| money, and I'm sure it was the right choice. I would have gotten
| bored of it pretty quick. You don't pay Oracle because it's a
| good deal or a good product... you pay Oracle so you never have
| to think about it ever again.
|
| I don't really have a point here. I wish there were better
| options in the market. But I certainly don't want to build them,
| since it's a boring problem with bad customers (edtech is a
| horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price point that makes
| it worth it to them, and they have customers willing to pay it.
|
| Hopefully someone sees this blog, and rather than be annoyed at
| academic/government waste, sees a big market they can dominate
| with a better product. But given how it was written in 2013, I'm
| not so sure.
| xmprt wrote:
| They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and
| software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that
| just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M
| without thinking.
| gkoberger wrote:
| CUNY's yearly budget is $5.7 billion, and they serve 243,000
| students. It makes up 0.088% of their budget.
|
| That $5M/year works out to $20/student/year, so in
| perspective it's a very small amount of money.
|
| (Source: https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy24/ex/agenc
| ies/appr...)
| cipheredStones wrote:
| The one-letter omission of "k" in "$20k/student/year"
| really makes a difference here.
| gkoberger wrote:
| No, $5M / 250,000 is $20. (I updated my comment to add a
| clause about $5M, to reduce confusion.)
| xmprt wrote:
| > so in perspective it's a very small amount of money
|
| $5M/year could pay for at least another 10-20 professors
| which is like an entirely new department. Let's also not
| forget the initial $600M spent which (assuming they'll use
| this software for the next 30 years) will be $20M/year
| bringing the total to $100/student/year which isn't
| negligible.
|
| More broadly speaking, I have a gripe with people bringing
| up percentages of budgets when discussing how much value
| something brings. My college had a startup fair where
| students pitched some super innovative ideas. The grand
| prize was $5000. If we had $5M, we could give that grand
| prize to 1000 teams and imagine how much more valuable that
| would be for the school compared to another feature
| bloated, overpriced piece of software.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Okay, so if you hire 10-20 more professors... who's going
| to build and maintain the system so students can sign up
| for those classes?
| coliveira wrote:
| > edtech is a horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price
| point that makes it worth it to them, and they have customers
| willing to pay it.
|
| The way businesses deal with this is by selling more expensive
| software! That's why Oracle is getting rich by selling crappy
| software to difficult sectors that nobody wants to touch.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Well sure if you can manifest money like a daydream, then you
| won't have to think about it anymore. I don't know though,
| maybe there are some folks out there who do in fact spend time
| thinking about unnecessary costs?
| gkoberger wrote:
| Yes, as an individual you do. But you're not a network of
| universities with 250,000 students a year that NEEDS the
| system to work.
|
| (Also, most people don't agree they're paying Oracle $600M
| for this... there's no source, and it's likely significantly
| less.)
| riazrizvi wrote:
| My understanding is that this network of universities is in
| fact a bunch of individuals who sometimes care about costs
| they are generating for their customers.
| alberth wrote:
| I know hating on Oracle is en vogue, but I struggle to believe
| this $600M figure.
|
| a. I use to work in this space, even a $6M deal would be massive
| (let alone something 100x bigger).
|
| b. The ENTIRE cuny budget in 2013 was only $2B [0]. This isn't
| their IT budget, this is literally the entire budget to run the
| entire university system across multiple campus, faculty,
| buildings, etc.
|
| c. Because Higher Ed is known to be so cheap, especially in the
| late 00s - big tech companies charged accordingly (which was at a
| massive discount relative to most other accounts).
|
| d. even if this $600M figure was an aggregated figure over
| multiple years, staffing and auxiliary costs - it still wouldn't
| come close to this figure.
|
| e. an expenditure this large would definitely be called out in
| CUNY annual financial reports, and I can't seem to find any
| reference to it.
|
| [0] https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/media-
| assets...
|
| ---
|
| EDIT: I did find reference last year to a $175M funding request
| to migrate from on-prem PeopleSoft (Oracle) to cloud.
|
| Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the
| funding request actually go to the software vendor. Organizations
| typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in
| the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an
| opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles
| they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place -
| so lots of things get buried in these numbers.
|
| Lastly, the figures are also typically multi-year. Like 5-years
| being asked up front for approval.
|
| Said differently, it wouln't surprise me if the true annual
| migration cost from onprem to cloud PeopleSoft might only be
| $10-20M
|
| https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/...
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| Yeah seems like 50-100 % administrative overhead for each
| employee, hard to believe that someone would accept that, you
| could probably pay each employee a personal valet for that.
| matwood wrote:
| 50% overhead is pretty common for academic institutions. For
| example, indirect costs for an awarded grant are often 50%+.
|
| And yes, it's ridiculous.
| pphysch wrote:
| I've heard some of the national labs have 100-200% overhead
| for some grants
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| This is absolutely right - the education space is absolutely
| stingy and will balk at far lesser amounts; so the $600M seems
| difficult to believe.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in
| my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra
| level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY
| spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs.
|
| Edit:
|
| I did some digging into the Tender [0] and it looks like it
| was $300M total across all 25 universities and colleges in
| the CUNY system along with the CUNY administrative portion
| itself and it was a full bundle of HRM, ERP, On-Prem Compute
| Resources, and headcount (PS and internal) over a 10 year
| period, so $30M per year across all 26 institutions.
|
| This came out to around $1.25M ACV per organization (10 year
| contract, 26 organizations).
|
| In reality, some of the larger colleges (eg. CCNY) will have
| spent much more than the smaller ones (eg. Bronx CC).
|
| In addition, each of the large CUNY colleges had budgets in
| the $150M range in the early 2010s [1] along with a separate
| $2B budget for CUNY's central organization (as mentioned
| above)
|
| What seems to have happened is the above page treated overall
| TCV as part of a single budget, when in reality, each
| individual constituent org with it's own budget spent out of
| their own pocket for ERP, HRM, Headcounr (PS and internal),
| and Compute (on-prem)
|
| This isn't egregious for the size of organizations that each
| of the constituent colleges and CCs in CUNY are.
|
| The big question is, if you used the PSC's (imo flawed)
| methodology, what would it give for CSUs, UCs, and SUNY (all
| of whom have a similar structure and student size). I'd
| expect a similar amount.
|
| [0] - https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-
| assets/...
|
| [1] - https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/u
| pload...
| phs318u wrote:
| This should be the top reply. Thanks for digging into it.
| alephnerd wrote:
| On top of that, digging into their manifesto in the page
| above, I found this startling and horrifying stance the
| PSC has
|
| > CUNYFirst will be part of the arsenal by which CUNY
| Central shoves Pathways down our throat
|
| Basically, the CUNY PSC is opposed to a unified core
| curriculum, allowing students at all CUNY institutions to
| transfer between each other.
|
| This is something that is diametrically opposed to
| student well-being.
|
| Basically, the PSC at the time opposed NYC community
| college students from taking courses at CUNY's 4 year
| universities and vice versa, and was strongly opposed to
| interoperability and transfer of credits.
|
| California's equivalent system (ASSIST) has had a massive
| benefit in allowing Californian community college
| students to transfer to CSUs, UCs, and private schools
| like USC and Stanford.
|
| CUNY's faculty union (PSC) on the other hand is
| completely opposed to a similar system being adopted.
|
| The whole point CUNY PSC was opposed to the CUNYFirst
| system was basically because the PSC was completely
| opposed to allows simplified inter-college transfer.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I've seen this happen before with big companies - they don't
| have $100k to pay for software which would save them $5M /
| year.
|
| Why? They'd signed a contract with SAP who'd sucked up their
| entire budget.
| momoschili wrote:
| Not quite true, especially not for the higher end research
| universities.
|
| The University of Washington is projected to spend $2B on
| modernizing IT infrastructure (which does seem like a
| reasonable amount).
|
| In that number though is $340M to update it's accounting
| system. Not quite directly comparable to $600M for HR, but
| not completely perpendicular either
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's $300M over 10 years split across 26 institutions.
|
| In fact I'd say this is a better deal than the one the UW
| Systen got.
| momoschili wrote:
| A lot more institutions, but in terms of total number of
| students, about 4x the UW system, ~2x amount of
| administrative staff, 4x the academic staff.
|
| Not saying the UW got a good deal of course, it's pretty
| clear based on the progress of the modernization that UW
| didn't.
| jeffwask wrote:
| My first thought was for $800 million you could found your own
| startup to write an HRMS and have enough left over for a fleet
| of super cars.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, San Francisco tried that for $40m and all they ended up
| with is a system that doesn't work and an Indian contractor
| that they made rich.
| rlt wrote:
| Sounds like poorly aligned incentives.
| renewiltord wrote:
| SF's watchword is "MORE FUNDING". Money is like violence:
| if it isn't working, you aren't using enough.
| lesuorac wrote:
| That's kinda the only lever a lot of government has.
|
| If you don't build out a bunch of civil positions then
| you can only solve problems by throwing money at ideally
| somebody who can.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's my dream. One day I hope to recommend someone
| spend more money on me because I suck at what I do. So
| long as it's not their money, they should be quite
| willing.
| p_l wrote:
| If they paid WITCH company to realise it...well, they got
| what they paid for
| efitz wrote:
| With government bureaucrats with no penalty for failure and
| no expertise in software development guiding the design? And
| "lowest bidder" contractors to implement whatever shitty
| design the bureaucrats came up with?
|
| Hahaha recipe for failure.
| mhuffman wrote:
| I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a
| CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic.
| Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec,
| hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I
| bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made
| about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and
| given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the
| excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if
| you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that
| company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in
| Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is
| not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only
| worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the
| users of the site had to do work every day due to legal
| deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until
| the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent
| about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept
| the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.
| echelon wrote:
| [deleted]
| hyperpape wrote:
| This is not a particularly useful contribution.
|
| Source 1: Only mentions anonymous sources. And while I would
| put partial weight on that coming from an actual journalist,
| this is the same professor who wrote the original blogpost.
|
| Source 2: Same publication as Source 1, though I don't see a
| byline. No named sources.
|
| Source 3: No named sources. The "About Us" features Lorem
| Ipsum and four photos of the same woman.
|
| Source 4: A reddit post, no sources, and the amount quoted is
| not $600 million, but $250 million.
|
| Source 5: A petition. References an Oracle press release that
| didn't show up in your Google search (most likely because it
| doesn't exist, or it would be widely cited).
| tootie wrote:
| I'm reminded of the Oregon state health care exchange fiasco
| where Oracle took like $250M and never delivered a working
| product. Ended up in a lawsuit and a settlement.
| hyperpape wrote:
| It was also reported by much more reliable sources, and was a
| statewide project.
| koolba wrote:
| > Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad"
| their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded')
| and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for
| a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in
| the first place - so lots of things get buried in these
| numbers.
|
| A factor of 3-5x seems insanely overboard. Thats arguably
| fraudulent. Ditto for claiming the money is for one thing and
| then using it for something entirely different.
|
| I get that it's a communist era style scraping to get by / work
| around a broken budgetary system life in academia, but that's
| misappropriation of tax and tuition dollars.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| You ask for 5x the need, get 2x the original amount, and then
| when the project costs 1.9x as much as expected you're still
| slightly under budget!
| screye wrote:
| Reminds me of an anecdote about a lead engineer for metro
| rail projects in India.
|
| The lead engineer has over-designed the infrastructure by 3x
| over the standard. The junior engineer thought he was
| incompetent.
|
| Turns out, he's paid the big bucks to add affordances as
| counterbalance for corners cut due to corruption in every
| step of the production line.
| etempleton wrote:
| I cannot imagine any college paying 600 million for such a
| thing. I suspect the writer is very much mistaken on the price
| and a bit paranoid on the College's motives. Perhaps it is 600
| million over 10+ years.
|
| Why they would ever go with Oracle is another mystery as there
| are a number of vendors who specialize in this type of software
| for colleges (some of it good, most of it bad), so it would be
| foolish to explore a solution from Oracle that needs such a
| high level of customization to fit the needs of a University.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| These kinds of mysteries usually have a frustrating and
| mundane answer. The people with the power to make the
| decision:
|
| - were incompetent and just went with a big name, or
|
| - made the decision due to salespeople (social pressure
| and/or gifts), or
|
| - had interests that did not align with the org (ex. resume
| padding)
|
| But who knows, maybe there's a good reason they went with
| Oracle.
| etempleton wrote:
| You are likely correct. My best guess is they hired someone
| in IT from outside of higher education that had extensive
| experience with Oracle and had deployed it successfully in
| the past and so it was always going to be Oracle even
| though it was a poor fit.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| We don't know the true scope of this, but apparently $600m
| was low balling in this story:
|
| >The negotiations that were the run-up to the purchase of
| CUNYFirst were a travesty. The project required an
| expenditure of up to a billion dollars to do it right. CUNY
| Central offered far less. All but one of the bidders dropped
| out as a result: the project could not be done properly with
| what CUNY offered. Oracle-PeopleSoft did not drop out.
| However they warned CUNY that for that level of funding, they
| could not, would not CUSTOMIZE: they would only CONFIGURE.
|
| I do agree that it sounds like this was some 10+ year project
| with heaps of support. If this account it true, they went
| with Oracle because they were the cheapest (and were fine
| with the compromise of no configuration to hit that goal).
|
| If that hunch is true, I can see some $600k-$1m/year average
| for support of an entire _chain_ of universities (remember
| that CUNY is a systetem of 10 colleges and more CC 's like a
| UC, not just one campus) being peanuts that no one wanted to
| touch.
|
| Seems they got what they paid for:
|
| >The actual cost far exceeds the $600 million dollars that go
| to Oracle. Because processes are now much more inefficient,
| more people have to be hired to do tasks that were formerly
| automated.
|
| > - The interface is laughable: It looks like an early-90s
| update of 3270 bi-synch technology. Web 2.0? Ha. Not even Web
| 1.0.
|
| > - Because CUNY wouldn't pay for customization, we had to
| renumber our courses. This is just one of many, less visible
| to faculty, changes that CUNYFirst has forced.
|
| absolutely not surprising as someone who's used Peoplesoft.
| That stuff felt ancient even in 2003. to sign onto that 10
| years afterwards for a very stagnant software is just
| insanity.
|
| -----
|
| now of course I'm taking this at face value. It could be
| exaggerated or from a biased source. But in my biased
| opinion, who in the last 15 years isn't biased against
| Oracle's software? they will probably literally die out as
| their clients age out of the job market.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Having worked for NY gov agencies for 7+ years, it's not that
| hard to believe really. Vendors overcharge crazy amounts all
| the time and get away with it without the gov client batting an
| eye. Experienced it first hand where I was on several projects
| where I did, without exaggeration, 95% of the work and my
| employer at the time charged $500,000 for one project and for
| another $750,000 in a single fiscal year.
|
| Sure, it wasn't $600 million (seems like that $600 million to
| Oracle had to of been spread out too), but the work was simply
| formatting their website content from an old template in their
| busted CMS (pretty sure it was some ancient HP CMS) in HTML and
| had to write some minor CSS and some minor JS. I ended up
| automating it locally and then the rest of the time was spent
| copying and pasting through this convoluted process due to
| having to connect to their outdated locked down remote desktop
| with a super slow connection. Additionally, I was only being
| paid under 6 figures at the time and it took much less time
| than they were quoted for, though my employer sat on their
| hands to make it seem like it took that much time.
|
| But yeah what the agencies were charged was unjustified irl...
| but on paper it was, they didn't push back on it or anything,
| and the cost of completing the projects was wayyy the hell less
| than what my employer at the time quoted them for. My
| assumption is they dont push back due to budgets not rolling
| over and wanting to maintain/increase their dept's annual
| budget. So it's not surprising they'd throw away that amount
| over the course of some years.
| thisisit wrote:
| I agree. The $600M number seems way too much.
|
| >Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the
| funding request actually go to the software vendor.
| Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad"
| their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded')
| and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for
| a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in
| the first place - so lots of things get buried in these
| numbers.
|
| As someone working on implementing an Oracle solution for a
| large bureaucratic MNC this is also true. The padding often is
| 3x-5x with 5 year run rate the funding asks can be crazy. For
| people who are just looking at numbers it can seem crazy. But
| for anyone who is implementing it or renewing contracts they
| know the real numbers.
|
| The migration costs though might be higher than $10-20M.
| Contractor costs can be crazy too. Sometimes costing multiples
| of the software costs.
|
| In my current practice I do notice that the vendors - both
| software and third party implementation partners - have a
| chummy relationship with a decision maker. This creates a lot
| of misaligned incentives when it comes to "company's" money.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| All things are possible. Here's a scandal where the NYC
| government spent $700M to implement a time card system. CUNY
| has access to public authorities like the research foundation,
| which may fund stuff in addition to their appropriations.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal
|
| If you go to openbookny, a contract website run by the NYS
| Comptroller, CUNY has a $800M Oracle contract that has
| dispersed $630M.
| jer0me wrote:
| This one for $800 _thousand_?
|
| https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contract.
| ..
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Whoops. Mea culpa! That's what I get for quick takes on a
| bus.
| coliveira wrote:
| If you think about, $600M is enough money that someone somewhere
| could create an entire new company and staff it with some of the
| best developers just to get this contract...
| rty32 wrote:
| Or CUNY could hire developers at silicon valley salary and
| build this in-house.
|
| As other posts have pointed out, it is unclear the 600M figure
| is accurate.
| pphysch wrote:
| And if this was the up-front cost, I'm sure there would be more
| DD about alternatives.
|
| But I'm sure the lock-in occurred long before the bill hit 9
| figures.
| bluedino wrote:
| It seems like there should be 5-6 vendors of 'University HR
| Software'
|
| You want 1,000 licenses for it? That will be $5,000 a year, for a
| total of $5 million
|
| It's going to us a year to implement it, we're going to send out
| 25 people to get it up and running, train your users, etc. That's
| another $25 million.
|
| We'll spend the next year building integrations to all of your
| other software and systems, that's going to be another $25
| million.
|
| These quotes will all vary +/- 25% depending on the vendor.
| Schedule a 200 hours of meetings, trainings, etc for 500 people
| involved with the new software. That's another $5 million.
|
| Where's the other $540 million coming from?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It seems like there should be 5-6 vendors of 'University HR
| Software'
|
| Why can't the CS department join up with other universities and
| have a bunch of students build it? Open source it.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I think that's a fine idea for a trade school
| tqi wrote:
| Well CS departments are rarely staffed by people who are
| interested in building actual software (if they were, they
| could just work in industry making significantly more money),
| and HR software is probably the worst vertical for a bunch of
| kids with no experience working in.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| My school tried this in the early 90s: they held a contest to
| make class scheduling software. I don't think it worked out-
| I certainly did not enter it.
|
| This was to replace the previous system: professor John van
| Alstyne just did it over a weekend.
| motohagiography wrote:
| to manage means to extract-value-from and $600M for software is a
| lot of value extracted.
|
| I'd bet huge that there is a layer of managers who don't see
| themselves as being accountable for domain competence in anything
| they manage as that's what the consultants are for. Consultants
| mean headcount and budget to manage- which is the definition of
| success in an institution. they run an organiation, the mission
| is little people IC problems.
|
| It's not broken, it just works for people you can't see.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I'd bet huge that there is a layer of managers who don't see
| themselves as being accountable for domain competence in
| anything they manage as that's what the consultants are for.
|
| Ah the old "management is a generic function" argument. A CEO
| from Coke is qualified to run GM or Intel. Just have the
| executive team give me all the information and spell out what
| results in the biggest $$$ and I'll "make the decision". I
| thought that silly notion was sunset some time ago...
| motohagiography wrote:
| it's how institutions work and it's very alive anywhere with
| inclusion programs of any kind. to hire managers based to
| anything other than strict hierarchical domain competence
| depends on the premise that managers are generic low agency
| minders of things that are already creating value themselves,
| and a transferrable/interchangeable function. nothing
| outdated about that at all.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I have been negative on Oracle since the '90s, when I had to work
| with an installer CD for Oracle software --- an official Oracle
| CD --- that:
|
| 1. Had multiple installer applications on it, with no indication
| which was "the" installer application. 2. On opening the
| installer, asked _me_ to select the install file to act on, again
| with no clear direction. 3. Had "help" files on the disc, in HTML
| format, which contained broken links to other files _on the
| disc_.
|
| At the same time my coworkers, experienced Oracle DBAs and
| developers, with _full paid-for support from Oracle_ , spent an
| entire summer trying to install an Oracle development
| environment, and failed.
|
| All of which to say, yeah -- $600 million sounds about right, as
| long as it turns out the software was never successfully
| implemented.
| neilv wrote:
| Garbage overpriced systems that everyone hates, and which
| substantially hurt the organization... How do you land those
| sales? (Joke: "Asking for a friend.")
|
| Some bad ways that big-ticket purchasing decisions are made:
|
| * Committee of people who don't know what they're doing, and/or
| who can't coordinate to arrive at a good holistic
| decision/solution.
|
| * Person who wants this done for good reasons, but doesn't know
| what they're doing.
|
| * Person who wants this as an accomplishment credited to them,
| but doesn't know what they're doing.
|
| * Person who is mainly thinking "nobody ever got fired for buying
| [old big-name vendor]", and everything else is secondary.
|
| * Person who is bribed by vendor (e.g., immediate cash, quasi
| dates with attractive salesperson, career rotating door with
| vendor).
|
| Other ways?
|
| (I haven't directly seen the bribery way, though heard of it in
| news stories. I've definitely seen all the other bad ways
| happen.)
| phonon wrote:
| 1. Be willing to spend 5 and 6 figures (unreimbursed)
| responding to lengthy RFPs. 2. Work with an established Systems
| Integrator (who will take a large percentage.)
| game_the0ry wrote:
| So I have an idea...
|
| Why not let the computer science students take a crack at
| building some of those systems? Maybe not the an HR system, but
| why not a course registration system? Maybe not for the whole
| university, but maybe for just the computer science department?
|
| The university would get work for free and the students would get
| real-world practice with building production code.
|
| I get that there would be risk, but if it was under the
| supervision of professors (who hopefully are good at building,
| not just lecturing theory), I think there is an opportunity
| there.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >Why not let the computer science students take a crack at
| building some of those systems?
|
| they need someone to blame if something gone wrong.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| This mentality needs to die.
| pgraf wrote:
| > I get that there would be risk, but if it was under the
| supervision of professors (who hopefully are good at building,
| not just lecturing theory) [...]
|
| Good joke here! If you are actually serious, please tell us
| which university you encountered where the majority of
| professors actually did something productive in computer
| science
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Personally, I would not paint all professors with the same
| shit-stained brush.
| pgraf wrote:
| Sorry if that came around as rude. From personal experience
| I have not met any professor in my life who could lead such
| a project, let alone with students that don't have any work
| experience... And you imply there should be multiple of
| them for the project to succeed
| narrator wrote:
| Does anyone know what "pathways" is and why they wanted so much
| central control to set that up? It seems that there was some sort
| of power angle to all this.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >Oracle-PeopleSoft did not drop out. However they warned CUNY
| that for that level of funding, they could not, would not
| CUSTOMIZE: they would only CONFIGURE
|
| In this case, I don't think Oracle is to blame.
|
| They explicitly warned about the 'limitation,' yet the project
| proceeded nonetheless.
|
| In my opinion, for this project to succeed, it should have been
| built from scratch. With the $800 million invested, they could
| have assembled a team of seasoned and junior developers to get it
| done. Just my two cents.
| dancemethis wrote:
| Now that's a... difficult company name.
|
| Certainly one of the names of all times.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| My goodness, the world never changes. Saw the same "new
| enterprise software much worse than the incumbent, terrible
| UI/UX, everyone hates it" dynamic play out *30 years ago* with
| SAP R/3. When I check back in 2054, expect it will not be any
| different. Technology changes, but people and organizational
| dynamics largely do not.
| tqi wrote:
| > CUNY Central was so eager to have a centralized MIS tool to use
| for its own centralizing, corporatizing agenda, that it totally
| ignored the implications of the Oracle "configure-only"
| limitation: business processes would have to be made to fit
| Oracle, not vice versa. Capabilities that we now have will
| vanish. The staff, the faculty, the students would just have to
| "adjust" (the technical term being "suck it up").
|
| This is an interesting perspective. From what I've seen / heard
| from others, it's generally better to adapt processes to the off-
| the-shelf tool than to try and customize or build from scratch to
| accommodate your bespoke processes (especially in the business
| operations realms). For one, the organization is likely less
| unique than you think, and those bespoke processes are as often a
| function of some early employee's preference as it is a genuinely
| good reason. For another, customizing software is not just a one
| time cost, since every subsequent update / upgrade is likely to
| require additional work (or at least testing). And finally, in
| most cases the closer you are to a vanilla, standard process, the
| more likely you are to stay in compliance with local laws and
| regulations.
|
| Though I suppose it's possible that the imbalance is just due to
| the fact that it is much harder to quantify the costs of using a
| suboptimal (for you) process than it is to look at the
| procurement contract for a custom solution.
| nfriedly wrote:
| One more reason to adapt your process to the tool is that it
| can make hiring/training easier.
| wvenable wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. Any attempt to adapt
| processes to an off-the-shell tool have always been a subpar
| experience for everyone. I've brought a few of these in house
| as fully custom software and the end result has been a better
| user experience and faster changes. If we can buy something
| that fits the need, we will. But if we can't, we build. And we
| build a fair bit.
|
| I disagree with "the organization is likely less unique than
| you think". If you're big enough you will have unique
| requirements that nobody else has. I'm in the middle of that
| now in a project to install some industry standard software
| that runs the whole business and we have to customize and add
| custom integration into it. I wouldn't want to build software
| this complex in house but if I was given the resources and
| tasked to do it, I could, and it would be better.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| There are two different scenarios.
|
| Scenario 1: You're doing something that every other business
| is doing. E.g. ERP/accounting, sales, contact center, etc.
|
| Scenario 2: You're doing something few other businesses are
| doing. E.g. your actual customer business, creative, etc.
|
| (1) is amenable to making your process fit software, to good
| results. (2) is usually a train wreck.
|
| Unfortunately, figuring out if your thing is scenario 1 or 2
| is non-trivial.
|
| Canonical example: EMR/EHR systems in healthcare. You think
| they'd be the same... but actually there are so many
| integrations with other systems and/or different sorts of
| specialists, that a real world implementation has substantial
| functionality gaps (papered over with custom work).
| wvenable wrote:
| My impression is that most people don't understand just how
| awful most commercial business software actually is.
|
| One thing our business does that every other business does
| is vacation and overtime tracking. We have a custom in
| house application for that and we've yet to find a
| commercial replacement that is, in anyway, half decent. For
| most Payroll/HR systems, this is merely an add-on feature
| and doesn't get much attention.
|
| For overtime, integration with our financial system allows
| overtime to be charged to the correct files and this is
| something that nobody does (or does well). Probably doing
| just this little bit makes this project pay for itself.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Beside the lack of attention, you also have gargantuan
| legal requirements you need to integrate. Which change
| all the time. Sometimes a few per country.
|
| This is for everything: pay, vacation, etc.
|
| It is really complicated.
| wvenable wrote:
| One advantage of building in house is that you're only
| building for your own company. This is _significantly_
| less work than building commercial software for multiple
| clients (which I have also done). I can 't overstate how
| much less work this is and how much of a better
| experience it can be for users.
|
| As an example, for calculating annual vacation
| entitlement, we have some pretty complicated rules. But
| every company in every country has their own set of rules
| so most HR software doesn't bother calculating it -- you
| just figure it out manually and input it every year for
| every employee. But because we just have one "client" our
| rules are just code that we can change as needed and can
| arbitrarily use whatever information we have. This saves
| HR a ton of manual work all the time. But this only works
| because it only needs to be one set of hard-coded rules.
| oneplane wrote:
| Commercial business software manufacturers are isolated
| from the users and in a way isolated from consequences as
| long as they fulfil the contractual obligations (which
| practically never has a 'make the users happy'
| stipulation).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think this is why you only see innovation via
| alternatives vs within a product.
|
| E.g. Salesforce, Workday rising up to replace incumbents,
| but then themselves becoming stale.
| tqi wrote:
| > If you're big enough you will have unique requirements that
| nobody else has.
|
| Definitely agree, and that is very interesting to hear. I
| only mean to speak to my experience, and what I saw in a lot
| of cases was unique requirements that were due to the
| organizational equivalent of tech debt (ie things like "our
| books are organized in this unique way because we acquired
| this other company a many years back but kept their stuff
| separate because it was the path of least resistance at the
| time").
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's a legit issue. What's the value of changing a deep
| seated process?
|
| I have definitely seen examples on both sides of that
| question. Especially in a place like a public university
| with multiple collective bargaining agreements. The unions
| aren't going to accept significant change without some sort
| of cost.
|
| Typically, since processes are built around the system,
| nobody understands the actual business needs.
| wvenable wrote:
| Nearly all our long-term tech debt come from having to work
| around limitations in the commercial software we use.
| manvillej wrote:
| > If you're big enough you will have unique requirements that
| nobody else has.
|
| the problem is when EVERY process is that way.
|
| yes, each business has unique aspect to their processes, but
| when every process is heavily customized by people who have
| no business designing processes & applications, organizations
| start to hamstring their flexibility and scalability.
|
| Its like hand-making a Ferrari with completely custom parts
| when what you need is a Toyota Camry. If you aren't gonna
| race with it, its a waste of money.
|
| I have been working in the ERP space for over a decade. and
| almost ALL customers have no criteria for when to customize
| or keep a customization. They don't do any cost benefit
| analysis or any strategic planning beyond building a
| customized tool for the thing immediately in front of their
| nose.
| FartinMowler wrote:
| Exactly this! I recall a large survey of SAP deployment
| projects in the late 1990s. By far the most successful
| consultancy, out of Chicago I think it was, had it written in
| their contracts "you'll change your business processes to match
| SAP; not SAP to match your existing business processes" (more
| or less). By turning away clients who could not accept that,
| they had happy clients, happy employees (little burn out), and
| no runaway costly never-ending death march projects.
| cbsmith wrote:
| There's a bit of selection bias going on there though. The
| reality is that SAP and similar products are designed for a
| business that works a certain way, and so obviously
| businesses that fit that profile are most likely to get value
| from using the tool. However, there's a reason other
| businesses don't work that way, and often retooling to work
| the SAP would be a net negative. Sometimes retooling SAP to
| fit the business is _also_ a net negative, in which case the
| right choice is just to not use SAP, but I 've certainly
| observed cases where there was a benefit from refactoring the
| tool to fit the business.
| NearAP wrote:
| > There's a bit of selection bias going on there though.
| The reality is that SAP and similar products are designed
| for a business that works a certain way
|
| ERP products are designed following "standard" or "best"
| practices/processes. It's common to see companies first
| contract a consulting company to "re-design" their
| processes before they then try to implement an ERP system.
| cbsmith wrote:
| s/ERP/any other business software product/
|
| ...and yet there are all kinds of segments where
| customized tooling is more the norm than otherwise. It
| just depends on whether the deviation from the norm is a
| competitive disadvantage or a competitive advantage.
| There are a lot businesses where in at least one case, it
| is an advantage.
| jll29 wrote:
| On "retooling SAP": SAP deliver their systems with all
| source code and dev platform included, and that may help
| convince some customers to go for SAP.
|
| However, those that embark on deviating from the well-
| trodden path are going to be in trouble soon: after every
| update, potential changes made need to be re-done or edited
| or at least tested. So as the parent suggests it's really
| better to adjust the business process if you can.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > So as the parent suggests it's really better to adjust
| the business process if you can.
|
| That's another way of saying that there are serious
| trade-offs going that way that need to be justified...
| which may also be true for the path of adjusting the
| business process.
| FartinMowler wrote:
| There's a ton of variety out there in the real world such
| that you'll always find a few businesses that match almost
| any scenario you can imagine. So, yes, for some business
| doing a process a certain way is a competitive
| differentiator or advantage ... or even a necessity for
| their particular industry. For these businesses banging the
| SAP square peg into their special BP round hole is worth
| attempting. Even better might be just building their own
| custom round peg. I'm suggesting that many (not all)
| businesses are doing a BP a certain way for no compelling
| reason whatsoever other than that's the way they (almost
| randomly) picked to do it decades ago and could easily
| change to a standard practice without loss of
| competitiveness (maybe even gain by focusing on what does).
| cbsmith wrote:
| Exactly what I'm trying to say, though written better.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _From what I 've seen / heard from others, it's generally
| better to adapt processes to the off-the-shelf tool_
|
| I have never seen this work even once. I've actually built
| entire businesses on the concept that people are impossible to
| change, but software is easy to change.
| mooreds wrote:
| Did you use much off the shelf software? I mean, I'm guessing
| you used databases and frameworks, but were the business
| process and UI components off the shelf or custom?
|
| Because it's a tradeoff.
| tqi wrote:
| Makes sense, this is just my personal experience so it's
| always interesting to hear what others have seen. I recently
| learned about Mechanical Orchard[1], which seems to have the
| same thesis (better to update legacy custom software with a
| modern custom solution rather than migrate to a modern off-
| the-shelf solution).
|
| [1] https://www.mechanical-orchard.com/
| NearAP wrote:
| Not ERPs.
|
| Customizing ERPs is where consulting firms make money but the
| ERP vendors themselves advise against this because it becomes
| expensive maintaining the customizations as new versions of
| the software and more features are released.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Now you have two problems: rolling out the new system and
| changing the business process. And you'll solve them
| simultaneously, and if anything goes wrong, you'll roll both
| back...
| bluGill wrote:
| Business processes change all the time. Often you are better
| off changing - if you are more like everyone else you can
| hire someone who knows your processes and they are useful
| without a lot of training. So short term costs, but long term
| better.
| jkaptur wrote:
| "IT will tell you what the new process has to be" is
| usually a pretty tough sell.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| best example: the EUR500m disaster Lidl had with SAP [1]
| https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The problem is, the business process shipping with Oracle may
| be grossly inefficient. Or worse, the former Siebel module and
| its integration with a former PeopleSoft module may be replaced
| by some new thing with yet another business process.
|
| In any case, CUNY would likely save $300M hiring clerks armed
| with excel and paper forms.
|
| Seems like a lot of money wasted, mostly to advance a
| "lowercase p" political dispute to consolidate HR functions
| with a questionable benefit.
| themerone wrote:
| I work on bespoke ERP software, it's not an undertaking to be
| taken lightly, but you are missing a key point.
|
| Every process that doesn't your software doesn't accommodate
| becomes a manual process. There is an employee in a sibling
| department, using other software, who's full time job doing the
| work of one of my applications in excel.
| zemariagp wrote:
| Was it written in PHP?
| vondur wrote:
| The California State University system contracted with PeopleSoft
| to consolidate their various non integrated systems back in 2003.
| Initial costs were supposed to be 350 million, but instead
| ballooned to over 700 million. We still don't use the full
| functionality of the suite, even though it's all been payed for.
|
| Full report here:
| https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/sr2004/2002-110.pdf
| pie_flavor wrote:
| And it's the absolutely worst system ever, a complete pain in
| the ass in every way. If you've never touched PeopleSoft, they
| not only spent hundreds of millions on a system, but on a
| system that sucks away years from your life-force.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| As a somewhat related PeopleSoft story, the government of Canada
| paid IBM and a variety of contractors $3.5B over several years
| for a PeopleSoft-based payroll system called Phoenix.
|
| The system was a disaster. It never worked properly. So the
| government is throwing hundreds of millions towards its
| replacement.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In government procurement positions, I would be in favor of
| giving a small %-ge (to the tune of a few hundred thousands of
| dollars) of money saved from budget to the people in charge of
| procurement.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Drexel University nearly bankrupted itself in the 80s, among
| other things, by hiring Lockheed (then Martin Marietta) for a
| similar boondoggle project. The project was an unmitigated
| disaster that never delivered anything, and the university had to
| pay to exit the contract.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-18 23:02 UTC)