[HN Gopher] Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
___________________________________________________________________
Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
Author : sebastian_z
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-12-13 20:58 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| natas wrote:
| workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company
| (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something
| else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
| rwmj wrote:
| You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've
| ever been forced to use.
| johnboiles wrote:
| Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| Whatever you're using handles international employees (UW has
| visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to
| enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests,
| etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers
| that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any
| other weird combination universities run into?
|
| I mean, I'm not saying that $266m isn't ridiculous and that
| Workday isn't very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just
| use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP
| isn't realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a
| full health system) and 50k students. There's three total
| software packages you can take seriously on the market for
| this, and they all suck in their own way and are all
| ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.
|
| Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and
| students.
| rwmj wrote:
| They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could
| have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of,
| say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| UW and Washington University are two totally different,
| unrelated institutions.
| qmr wrote:
| You might want to share with the class?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7
| days takes a university 7 years and $266M
|
| proof we should be getting paid for assessments
| msy wrote:
| Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of
| Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine
| their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed
| them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up
| but productivity has flatlined.
| rwmj wrote:
| ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever
| deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at
| it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase
| process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
| skissane wrote:
| > ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever
| deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at
| it?
|
| When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my
| point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time)
| was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I
| did some consulting for a major bank which was using some
| 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something... I believe it has
| finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years
| ahead of that too.
| rgovostes wrote:
| I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at
| least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a
| ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along
| when my colleagues reference a ticket.
|
| I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't
| load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the
| system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it
| didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
| (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
|
| They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that
| pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put
| the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser.
| Weird, wonder why they need that...
| rwmj wrote:
| Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL
| scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like,
| did the developers forget to implement that?
| rgovostes wrote:
| Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this
| is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help"
| icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window
| saying:
|
| > Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for
| users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature's
| generative AI skills blah blah blah
|
| Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now
| Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a
| marketing blurb for some other feature.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| We have something called ServiceNow where I work. It's so
| horrible that I assumed it was in house.
| basket_horse wrote:
| These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-
| house software for their complex workflows also tend to run
| millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
|
| Also, I wouldn't put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and
| ServiceNow. It's expensive, but it does work.
| natas wrote:
| it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I guess I have three questions here.
|
| 1) What happened to the days when universities published their
| own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St
| Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some
| students capable of writing a database to run the university.
|
| 2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular,
| expandable system for running a university, instead of putting
| themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
|
| 3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on
| paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the
| university so lose its organizational competence that the filing
| system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
| natas wrote:
| 1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to
| manage a project of this size, universities have become
| expensive adult daycares.
|
| 2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't
| handle.
|
| 3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains
| electrolytes, duh.
| wongarsu wrote:
| To quote the university's website:
|
| > Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program
| provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects,
| and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and
| senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true
| organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business
| environments
|
| Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software
| projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or
| make it a student-run program, but surely something can be
| arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the
| Information Systems Management courses
| Spivak wrote:
| Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using
| university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty
| difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned
| university employees could do any worse.
|
| I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their
| peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the
| administration.
| colechristensen wrote:
| A LOT of major software was written in universities, plenty
| of the foundational technologies of the Internet included.
| pknomad wrote:
| I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel
| laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this
| area:
|
| 1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the
| same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to
| dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar
| platform offers lot of appeal.
|
| 2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at
| some point certain features get prioritized over others. I
| support a platform that was built in house before I was born.
| The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any
| product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any
| decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not
| relevant.)
|
| Every single time I worked for a company that said let's hiring
| an engineering team to build a software that is already solved
| by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house
| product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
|
| 3. Can't answer this one other than digitization efforts.
|
| For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| > For transparency, a single software engineer budget is
| $670K+.
|
| Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software
| engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
|
| Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are
| specifically talking about places with the highest cost of
| living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over
| $200K.
| basket_horse wrote:
| It's not rocket science, but you're vastly underestimating what
| it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like
| security and support, which a university is not setup well to
| handle in house. The phds should be spending their time
| learning and doing research, not managing admin software.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > At what point did the university so lose its organizational
| competence that the filing system (that's what a database is)
| ate the budget?
|
| Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the
| university's customers. Why would the university's leaders not
| take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as
| possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university
| employees' cut (incl the board).
| russfink wrote:
| Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer
| applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems
| to handle its tasks, especially with AI's around to offer coding
| help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it
| to students to develop said systems.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| "Just let students vibe code your ERP" is a hell of a take.
| Spivak wrote:
| Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one
| thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk
| of this project seems to be a new custom application intended
| for student and faculty use.
|
| It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| What you describe is possibly the one thing that would be worse
| than implementing Workday.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for
| HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000
| employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.
|
| HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in
| organizations as divided as a large private research university
| that is _also_ a major healthcare network [2].
|
| [0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-
| lou...
|
| [1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/
|
| [2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the
| container that contains it (whatever budget that they can
| convince people to spend driven by however large an
| administration the leadership can get away with to justify
| their salary).
|
| People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the
| middle management disease that takes over everything unless
| people are very careful.
| alephnerd wrote:
| An organization that houses, feeds, provides community
| medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private
| university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for
| procurement, human resource management, integrating different
| business units, etc would of course be _extremely_ complex.
|
| Just because _YOU_ don 't understand the complexities behind
| managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k
| dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.
|
| This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data
| redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of
| opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.
|
| At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM
| projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that
| plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era
| system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely
| going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.
|
| So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they
| just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
|
| Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial
| complexities
|
| Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a _major_
| medical network in it 's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs
| that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to
| the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were _also_ medical
| networks.
|
| But the issue is, medical PHI _is_ important, and outages can
| lead to liability and potentially patient risk.
|
| > At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of
| CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew
| that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some
| COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they
| were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like
| a necessity
|
| Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along
| would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had
| dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Spending $2k/year/student on it sounds pretty insane to me. At
| that price it would be cheaper just to hire an army of
| secretaries and do it on paper.
| johnboiles wrote:
| How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the
| worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose
| data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs
| was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep
| copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last
| moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback
| you could just paste it again.
|
| It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers
| though?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It must be really really really good for the HR decision
| makers though
|
| Data Integration.
|
| Workday is _extremely_ good at integrating various different
| data sources and providing support to build integrations if
| they are not offered by them.
|
| A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of
| around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal
| operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities
| maintenance, an _entire_ community medical network dedicated to
| STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and
| faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.
|
| All of these are entire business units or functionally
| independent organizations. And in this complexity arises
| multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas,
| and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows
| exponentially _and_ you as an organization need a way to better
| understand what is happening.
|
| That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
| Etheryte wrote:
| My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows
| it, everyone knows how to use it.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still
| and not _already_ on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian
| Banner. I wasn 't expecting Workday here, though.
|
| That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't
| employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as
| an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
| arionmiles wrote:
| I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday
| is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of
| working with.
|
| - The UI is slow as hell.
|
| - The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is
| a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to
| discover them.
|
| - Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around
| discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered
| burnout by the end of it.
|
| Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does
| and charging the way it does in 2025.
| leecoursey wrote:
| Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" -
| https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.
| captainregex wrote:
| this is a disgusting amount of money for this
| jonplackett wrote:
| Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called
| in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to
| go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.
|
| Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails,
| especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature
| software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it
| seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the
| industry.
|
| The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as
| fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
| wmf wrote:
| Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no
| acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| With that amount of money I'd suspect corruption unless
| explicitly proved otherwise.
| zephyreon wrote:
| I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently
| and it has been a total disaster.
|
| Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles
| everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net
| efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came
| from.
|
| It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants
| though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
| natas wrote:
| infinite money glitch!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-13 23:01 UTC)