Stanford Learns a Software Lesson 314
Nick Irelan writes "In 1994 Stanford set aside $60 million to aquire the latest financial and management software from PeopleSoft and Oracle. However, the upgrade that was planned years ago is still not complete. Stanford has even begun outsourcing! 'Those who can't do teach :)'."
or not (Score:5, Insightful)
As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems.
Re:or not (Score:2, Insightful)
"As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems."
It would be prudent to consult several lawyers, accountants, and computer scientists before making such an IT committment, and it's quite an insult that they wouldn't have thought to go in-house for such consultation. This is *Stanford*. They shouldn't have any problem finding competent people in their organization.
It's really embarrassing that they got into this situation and they sho
I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
and yes, I do work for a university.
Re:or not (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also a quite a bit of ego clashing because some of the CS profs feel that they could do a better job if they were in charge, and a few of them could be right about that.
Re:or not (Score:3, Interesting)
The IT department that makes the network go regards the CS and IT departments just like every other acadmic department. They treat them no differently. They in fact dislike them because:
a) they aren't as smart as they are
b) they give the biggest fight against stupid
Re:or not (Score:3)
In this case, it seems the IT department was isolated from just about everyone. None of more common "best practices" appear to have been followed - e.g. users weren't on board with the changes before go-live, a "big bang" approach was taken on bringing in a new accounting system. Their gap analysis must have revealed that these packages needed more extensive customisation than usual, yet they went ahead
Re:or not (Score:2)
Re:or not (Score:5, Funny)
Re:or not (Score:5, Informative)
Said professor made the argument that a bunch of "kids" writing experimental software weren't qualified to write such software and that it should be left to the experts. Bear in mind that one of these "kids" is Brian Frickin' Kernighan who is a professor at Princton.
I did some digging on said professor who holds himself out to be an expert on web design. His online tutorial a)is some of the worst web design I've ever seen and b)was a pretty shitty tutorial.
A little further digging showed he's been in PeopleSoft's pocket since before day one.
There's a lot of politics in these things, and a lot of money flying around and buying opinion. As often as not the last thing those in power want is their own Computer Science people involved. That would queer the whole money flying around deal. Nevermind that it all, ultimately, has to be taken out of the hides of students and other customers.
KFG
Re:or not (Score:4, Funny)
I am so glad I am taking time away from school at least this way I will not spend 3 years learning how things are really done after I graduate.
Re:or not (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually one of the strongest arguments for Open Source.
Even if the software were more expensive for poorer quality and even if the support were inferior, you'd still come out ahead. Seems like Munich went for the more expensive Linux option.
"In fact, the high-profile business battle between the vendors complicates matters. Each company's software is known to interfere with the other's, to the detriment of customers like Stanford."
Makes KDE and Gnome sound friendly to each other.
"For Handley, a big problem is that the software is designed to be used by public companies, not decentralized educational institutions. He notes that every ERP package he's worked with--Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP--has a single ship-to address in the purchasing module. That's great for a company like IBM, which is organized around a central receiving unit"
WHAT! IBM has one loading dock? He's been had.
Re:or not (Score:2)
Re:or not (Score:3, Informative)
The guy at Princeton who wrote that silly attack on open source was a computer services management guy named Howard Strauss. He is not a professor.
Re:or not (Score:2)
Those who cannot manage become consultants and wear even more expensive suits.
Re:or not (Score:5, Interesting)
As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems.
True. According to the article:
I had a math professor in college who claimed that psychology majors picked that field because they believed they'd be able to cure themselves.Chris Handley, from the article: "Just buying the software does not solve the problem. You have to change the institution, and that's something Stanford struggled with."
This is the real problem with stuff like PeopleSoft and SAP. The user is expected to change their business rules to adapt to the software rather than the other way around. It's arrogant and bass-ackwards. Software is supposed to malleable and adjustable. That's why it's called software. Otherwise, it would be hardware or firmware.
Re:or not (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was young and cocky I prattled off that line. I have regretted it for the last 8 years. It's insulting, demeaning, and while it may be true in some cases, it's not true in nearly all cases and is on the same order as prejudice and racism.
Conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Three Stanford professors serve on Oracle's board of directors, and CEO Larry Ellison has pledged $10 million to the university as director of the Ellison Medical Foundation. Across San Francisco Bay behind a range of hills is PeopleSoft, which has been fighting Oracle's hostile takeover attempt for the last year.
Seems like there is a bit of a conflict of interest on all sides here. Big surprise that this is an expensive bust...
Re:Conflict of interest (Score:5, Informative)
Okay.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.
Re:Okay.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Okay.... (Score:2)
No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords, and since three prof's sit on Oracle's board of directors, you can bet it was them giving the admins the orders....
The people who buy 60 million dollar finance systems are not "admins". They are VPs or CIOs or COOs. They far outweigh professors in power in their areas of expertise. They would be flayed alive if they blamed purchasing problems on buzzword-happy professors.
You must have missed this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.
You must have missed this in the article: Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999.
Granted, he's not an instructor now but he surely is responsible for fixing the mess and has been for five years: [stanford.edu]
Handley joined Stanford in November 1999 as executive director of administrative systems. Previously, he directed the national Peopl
Collective Hallucination (Score:5, Funny)
That would have been Berkeley then, no? Home of LSD and UNIX IIRC.
Re:Collective Hallucination (Score:2, Informative)
And UNIX was invented by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, although UCB did contribute a lot to its development (which eventually led to BSD).
Re:Collective Hallucination (Score:3, Insightful)
"Those who cant..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own? Go tell your parents, your teachers, your professors, your bosses, your friends, etc.
Pardon the vulgarity, but grow some fucking common sense.
Re:"Those who cant..." (Score:3)
Re:"Those who cant..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Like another Shakespeare line "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Which comes from a play which upholds pretty much every negative stereotype people have held towards Jews (The Merchant of Venice). Out of context quotes are so passé.
Re:"Those who cant..." (Score:4, Interesting)
And immediately after it, Shylock is exiled (probably to his death), and his daughter goes off to participate in a one-act romantic comedy of mistaken identities which has nothing to do with the rest of the play.
So that quote is, in fact, quite in context, but the context is, uh, out of context.
I once saw a rendition with Hal Holbrook as a very troubled and sympathetic Shylock, and Holbrook's daughter as Jessica. They solved the problematic fifth act by having her be horrified at what's just gone on, as the audience's point-of-view character. It's not what Shakespeare intended, but it worked brilliantly.
Re:"Those who cant..." (Score:2)
'Course, Cade was sounding pretty tyrannical, what with the "felony to drink small beer" bit. But mostly Cade was just playing to the crowd, and apparently lawyers have been pissing off the multitude for a good long time.
Cade's Rebellion, if
Re:"Those who cant..." (Score:2)
The quote was given in the play as a description of the ideal community if one were king. Part of that ideal is to kill all the lawyers.
It was hardly a flattering remark about lawyers being some type of defenders of justice. It was just the opposite: lawyers cause the injustice, and getting rid of them would return justice.
'Those who can't do teach' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Knuth 'Those who can't do teach' (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle (Score:5, Informative)
-JT
Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle (Score:4, Informative)
Millions of dollars down the drain because the pointy-headed academic administrators can't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
More like foolish top management believed Peoplesoft was the way to go rather than develop their own system in-house. The peoplesoft problem doesn't exist in just acadamia, it's everywhere. Acadamia is just more transparent about it since they can't hide everything under a thick rug like Big Business can. The whole idea that you can make a single system payroll/accounting/registration/etc system for ALL BUSINESSES and just add custom features is a foolish one.
The tranisitions for academic institutions has been even more problematic, to the point where several of the large institutions were considering suing the pants off Peoplesoft a number of years ago due to the whole system not working. They decided not to sue simply because they feared Peoplsoft would collapse under the weight of a lawsuit, and they'd be more screwed than before.
Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle (Score:3, Interesting)
New PeopleSoft installs aren't trivial matters especially when it still has to interface to several home grown systems. Depending on the requirements, it can take years to replace an old mainframe based system with PeopleSoft, SAP, or any other ERP product. That's why consultants for those products make big bucks (they better...working your ass off and living in hotels for years at a time doesn't sound like fun to me).
BTW, quite a bit of PeopleSoft is written in COBOL, so the mainframers will be happy a
There something to be said... (Score:4, Insightful)
There will be a great market for companies who specializes in supporting older versions of software that the original software vendor no longer supports.
The term you're looking for is "middleware" (Score:2)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3797191.s
BTW, you can roll your own to a large degree, (jabber, email, nntp etc) but it makes absolute sense to have some form of MOM in your organisation if you have more than a couple of systems.
'Those who can't do teach :)'." (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, after all, it's not like John McCarthy [stanford.edu] wrote the Oracle financials package.
You know what they say... (Score:4, Funny)
And those who can't teach, teach gym.
While those who can't teach gym, teach college.
Re:You know what they say... (Score:2)
They should make their own open-source software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They should make their own open-source software (Score:5, Interesting)
Admin would probably refuse to use it. At the University of Waterloo [uwaterloo.ca], they used to have an absolutely unusable dumb-terminal based system for posting co-op jobs. The students (who are renound at the undergrad level) wrote the school a new system and presented it to admininstration... at least twice... that is, wrote two different replacements. Admin didn't take either of them. They ended up taking a system from people-soft that was late and terrible to use. Administration has no respect for the work product created by their own students.
Re:They should make their own open-source software (Score:2)
"In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king."
But not if Administration is blind.
Administration is comparing course assignments with what the students are actually capable of doing. What the students are capable of doing when they organize themselves to do it. The one essential ingredie
I proposed this to Clarkson University (Score:5, Interesting)
-russ
That's too bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
They must have thought it would cost too much. Anyone who objects on those grounds should be shown this $150,000,000 vendor nightmare.
The nuclear power plant I used to work for had spent $5,000,000 building custom software for itself with Powersoft tools. It worked beautifully. The administration types thought that it cost too much and fired their programmers with the bone headed attitude, "we are an electric company not a software company." Now they are putting in a fifteen million dollar commercial package. I'm not there anymore, but I'm sure it's going to be a dissaster. You have to wonder if they are going to fire their engineers and clerks because they are not an engineering firm or a filing company.
Just think of how much money everyone would have saved had they switched over to free software in the mid or late 90s.
Re:They should make their own open-source software (Score:2)
Re:They should make their own open-source software (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easy to add complexity. It is extremely difficult to reduce unnecessary complexity. Open Source is not a magic bullet, it's not that simple, but something is not working right when it takes all 5, simultaneously, rather than
Re:They should make their own open-source software (Score:2)
Unfortunately, universities aren't software companies that work on application development. Professors don't have time to develop things like this since they are researching new technology, attending conferences, writing papers, and occasionally teaching. Grad students have their own research to worry about and don't have time to invest in application development. Undergrads are too
OSS (Score:2)
Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:5, Insightful)
I've read some ignorant things on
As a student I actually think that it is much more true that "those who cannot teach 'do'" rather than vica verca. Get some common sense before saying somthing extremely STUPID like that.
Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:5, Insightful)
In Elementary school you spend the day with a teacher and might get 5-10 minutes of personlized attention from each teacher. By the time you get to highschool, you might get a few minutes of personalized attention from each teacher per week. You can make that more by being a more active student.
In college the students who just want to be told what to do get no personal time with the teacher. They also do not tend to get anything out of the class because the come in with the attitude that the professor do not care and do not want to explain. While this may be true in a limited sense, it is not a helpful philosophy.
In fact you did exactly what you should have done. Go to the books and get other points of view. If you were not connecting with the professor, then he or she did exactly what they should have done, which is to send to get other points of view. Unlike your teachers, professors are not trained to work the issue from every angle until the student understands. Now that the student is in college, they are expected to have the skills to find the answers themselves. A professor merely points out a useful direction.
Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:2)
I will also point out that somebody must choose the respect-worthy text for a course. Somebody also creates assignments and exams that will push students to learn the material.
After hanging around the front of lecture halls for a few years, I think creating assignments is the hardest part of the job. Lecturing is easy: put stuff together in a reasonably logical order, throw in some interesting examples, and try to f
Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:2)
Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bah - they might be better off (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bah - they might be better off (Score:3, Insightful)
What can't you modify? They give you the source for most of it so you can modify it to fit your environment and business requirements.
Some of the upgrades are necessary. Govts tend to get cranky if you're not withholding the proper amount of taxes. However, in my experience, it was always good to wait to apply the tax upgrades as long as possible because they would often include some bugs. I'd rather let the early adopters pull their hair out and wait for the resulting patches from PS.
Those who can't do, teach (Score:5, Informative)
Those who can't teach, do.
Many of those who teach can in fact do, and what the heck do you think teaching is? Is it not doing?
However many that can do, can't seem to teach. Which is why they pretend that those who can't do, teach.
Re:Those who can't do, teach (Score:5, Insightful)
Those that can do
Those that understand teach
Re:Those who can't do, teach (Score:2)
Hmm, I like the fact that it doesn't really imply the two are mutually exclusive.
This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts (Score:2)
Anyone who's had any substantial interaction with DCPS (I went to DCPS through college) knows that the system's administration is miles beyond incompetent (the system can't retain a superintendent for more than a year
Yeah, common problem alright. (Score:2)
Blame the user, eh?
Re:This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts (Score:3, Interesting)
When
What about those who teach AND do? (Score:2, Informative)
Or.. (Score:5, Funny)
hahaha (Score:2)
For their price they could have had 600 programmers for a year, or 60 for 10 years. Seeing that it's still not done, I doubt they had even a single good programmer on average working on their project for the majority of its lifetime. Maybe someone who could do what'd take a normal
$60 million??? (Score:2)
Are PeopleSoft not being sued? (Score:2)
still not complete. (Score:2)
Not news or even remarkable (Score:3, Insightful)
Fast moving private corporations struggle with ERP implementations - some even go out of business and blame it on the software... when in reality the problem was millions of threads holding gulliver down.
Academics don't do admin work (Score:3, Interesting)
processing) never talk to the academics. It is just not done.
After a number is major systems at the U of O (over 27 years) I can tell you,it doesn't happen.
The academics may not even be aware a system is changing until their secretary can't log on( or more likely is gone for training).
Another example of the core problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, there is a notion that "well, our competitors have it", or "we have to have it or we'll go out of business".
If you're just playing catch-up with your competitors, you aren't. There's certainly no innovation going on in your company, and beyond that you have no competetive advantage. That would be "stuff that makes you DIFFERENT".
So -- there's a fundamental perception problem. Since transitioning from a relatively advanced-thinking commercial development shop to an insurance company almost 10 years ago, I've been seeing this problem.
Given all of this context, the quote toward the beginning of the article by the Stanford CIO shows that Stanford also doesn't get it:
"Just buying the software does not solve the problem. You have to change the institution, and that's something Stanford struggled with."
No. You write (or buy/obtain if it's commodotizeable, like word processing or web servers) software that works to make the processes that you have more effective. Sometimes you need to make adjustments to have them work together. One case where you'd need to change is if you had a team of 50 people that did nothing all day long but go and pull index cards out of the card catalog in response to user requests -- putting in a database would require them to change this task. But overall, the process would be much more effective. Looking for a book (in this case) would remain functionally the same sort of thing.
The problem with software of this nature, or any "black-box-off-the-shelf" core business software is that it always comes with its own agenda regarding what the core processes of the business should be. To implement, the business has to change the way it does business in order to map into this new set of processes. AND often pay millions of dollars for the privilege. So, the business has just lost some of its competetive advantage (distinctiveness), AND has to pay a BUNCH per month. Plus they all come with maintenance fees now. On top of the original ridiculous price tag.
Why don't these businesses just write their own, you may be asking? Sadly, the answer is rather simple. In order to find out what you need the software to do, you need to get the users together and find out from them what they do.
First, this will take time. Generally, in a business, if you stand up and say "I have time to be able to do this extra thing" it translates as "because I don't do anything anyway", which is managerial for "I am an expense that produces nothing, fire me". So people don't like being put in that position. Second, it's human nature to not have a good idea what it is that you are doing. Go read about contextual design for discussion on this subject, and ideas on a method of getting around it. Suffice to say, people don't give good information when just asked -- they need to be watched. Which is time intensive (see 1 above). So, even if you get volunteers, unless you use the special tricks, you get bad information. Which leads to an incorrect product. See the last 20-30 years of "the software problem" for references here.
Sounds like a bottomless pit. The way out seems to me to be to get the users educated as to why the software need exists in the first place, then once they're educated, get them motivated to work together to discover what the software needs to do.
Easier said than done. Here're your shovels, get digging!
People, Not PeopleSoft (Score:3, Insightful)
What's so hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's so frickin' hard? I am a programmer, and I know how hard programming is, but (correct me if I'm wrong) the goal of ERP is to use a single integrated program to do tasks that have been written a million times before: accounting, payroll, inventory, etc.
I can't help but believe that the problem isn't on the technical side but the business side: each organization has an idiosyncratic way of doing business and believes that it's cheaper to write custom software, or expensively adapt ERP software, to its specific goals, rather than doing things in a standardized way that can be assisted cheaply by standardized software.
When you bring a program like Quickbooks into an office, you're expected to do things its way, because "its way" is a collection of well-understood accounting principles. The more you try to customize it, the more likely that it is you are simply doing the wrong thing.
ERP is, to my understanding, a scaled up version of the same thing. The scaling will always make things difficult; large organizations are going to be more different from one another than small ones. It also presents performance and reliability issues.
Still, I've heard of so many failures costing tens of millions of dollars with these programs that I start looking to blame something other than the software and software developers.
read the article and find out cause and cost. (Score:2)
If you read the article, you see that they have a vendor cluster fuck going on. Versioning and custom software to fit the institution that break for
Big Bucks for Stupid Bloatware (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's not even great for a large public company. It's unbelievably stupid. These vendors are getting the big bucks for massive ERP products containing everything but the kitchen sink, but when it comes to shipping and receiving, they typically just tack on a ridiculo
Not just Stanford... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually they found out that IBM had stopped development and sold the product to another company, without telling any customers. I understand that they're mad.
The whole project ended up in one large lawsuit where the universities sued Big Blue for NOK 50 million (approx. $7 million). IBM ansvered with a counter-suit for NOK 5 million in damages. The case ended with a NOK 20 million settlement.
Ironicaly it seems they have gone for an Oracle-system after this...
Link to an article [universitetsavisa.no] about the case, and one about the settlement [universitetsavisa.no] (both in Norwegian) for those who are interested.
Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Change an institution to match software? Why not change the software to match the institution?
the board of trustees since 1999 has been asked to approve $93.4 million in capital expenditures for applications and infrastructure . The trustees had approved $60 million in 1994 to overhaul Stanford's entire administrative information systems, a project they expected would take five years, even though controller Susan Calandra says some of the projects in the original plan were never started.
For $60,000,000 they should have a custom system that works with anything. Hell, they should have as much for $5,000,000. Now they want 93,000,000 more?
The delay has been caused in part by Oracle itself, which helped Stanford customize the software so heavily?changing Oracle Financials to accommodate the way Stanford redistributes overhead costs across its grants, for instance?that together they broke continuity with future versions of the software, rendering portions of what they put in place unusable.
I can't imagine something so poorly modularized. What's going on here?
The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"?installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on.
Oh, now I see they should have used free software from the get go and done it themselves.
Re:Shocking (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the really aggravating part: for $93M, I can put together a team of 100 (programmers, artists, technical writers, etc) dedicated to nothing but getting a fully functional, 100% customized to Stanford's business flow requirements, ERP system written and debugged in under a year. Each person would walk away with enough money to be very well off for quite a long time.
Whomever spent this much money with nothing to show should be dragged through the streets by rabid horse
It's the Staff, Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Give a university administrator a system she doesn't know or like, and she's not going to put any effort in to making it work.
Give an IT department a mandate that they don't feel they had an adequate role in bringing about, and they're going to blame the technology, no matter what the real problem is.
Slap down a system made for a sane business in front of a university and tell that university to behave like a sane business in order to make the system work... well, it won't work.
Having seen PeopleSoft and Oracle Financials implementations from several angles, I firmly believe that the technology is fine - nothing spectacular or earth-shattering - but fine. The problem lies entirely with the organization implementing.
How to fix this? There's the ten million dollar question. A hint at the answer is this: look at Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft implementations in organizations with strict heirarchical (read militaristic) management. Success rates?
Re:It's the Staff, Stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Having worked with Oracle Financials at a big UK university the amount of money wasted on consultants / consultant project managers was astronomical.
Some pulling in the order of 1500 GBP a day ( for months on end)! And managers wonder why projects run late....
we want to believe (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that was very clear to everyone who was thinking, even back then, was that an ERP would not pay for itself and therefore had to be bought on the basis on making life easier. Another thing that was clear was that you had to have a clear idea of how it would be used, and how much it would cost to use, otherwise it would never get used.
I saw the same blindness when i was working for a company that sold custom websites. Mostly we took a cut of advertising, and I suppose paid salesmen commission based on what we all now know is mark to market. At that time the advertising market was dying, and all the tech people, and even some of the managers, knew that the deals would result in no money. However that truth was not useful for the salesmen who wanted large commissions or the upper management that wanted large sales. So deals were put together that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to honor, with customers that made not commitments whatsoever. Of course all this came crashing down.
So, having worked in small business, corporate, and academia, I would say there is little difference in the ability to be blinded by greed and the smooth talking salesman.
ERP? Extracting Real Payola (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think the person(s) responsible for specifying off-the-shelf software with some customisations should be shot.
I've worked on ERP implementations, heck, I've worked on ERP software development. It's all about providing a sophisticated accounting system with cookie-cutter business modules around it. Everyone has customisations on it, how large those customisations are depend on how far away you are, or want to be, from the template the ERP provider offers. Education is well away from what those templates offer. Probably so far away that you cannot justify the cost of the migration and customisations. That leaves you wondering if someone recommended the migration because it would look good on their CV.
Stupid ! (Score:2, Insightful)
By having graduate students have as a final project something like that, they can save lots of bucks on things like that.
Why shouldn't they ? I know my university does. It also shows in a way that if you prepare students in those fields, you are confident of their capabilities, e.g. the level of 'education' your own university provides is good enough for they big companies you are train
ATTN Stanford Students: AYSIANBTI !! (Score:3)
Remember this when someone from abroad starts ruining your credit with SSN data stolen from outsourced student records.
Pray that East India doesn't treat you the way Dow treated those East Indian citizens during that little chemical accident a few years back...
Typical for ERP projects (Score:4, Insightful)
Bay Area Talent Drain (Score:2)
Minnesota (Score:2, Insightful)
often research faculty dodge admin committees (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember someone who was a reasonable faculty member who had been doing a good job as department chair, who agreed to become chair of a university committee that was overseeing a tranistion to PeopleSoft, in fact. I tried to talk him out of it and it did in fact become the huge morass with fingerpointing that I was worried it would become, but when deciding to do it he was sure this was a straightforward ticket to moving up the administrative food-chain to dean and so on. In my experience, research faculty tend to work much better in environments when the success is primarily determined by their own efforts, and being in a situtaion where you are depending upon an outside entity (particularly one from another (non-scientific) universe, like PeopleSoft or other huge corporate entity) is a recipe for disaster.
The point is that a university is a community and in general, people end up in different roles, perhaps at different times in their careers. Some faculty are effective researchers throughout their careers and would be unlikely to ask or be asked to serve on what I would think of as a "committee from hell," whereas others who are not contributing research-wise are often the ones who feel obligated or are asked to shoulder more of the adminstrative burden. Remember that faculty generally have no particular preparation in adminstration, and it is pretty random as to whether or not anyone works out well.
Stanford software (Score:3, Interesting)
I was on the Stanford faculty from 1983-1994. There was very little relationship between administrative computing and academic computing at the departmental level. (There was a centralized "academic computing" facility, run as I recall by the same people who ran the administrative stuff, that continued to be used for a while by the older-fashioned people in some non-science departments as others adopted PCs.) Administrative computing centered on an IBM dinosaur that ran a lot of locally developed software. Migration away from a system like that can be pretty rough, with data tied up in peculiar local formats, and a lot of the staff get very invested in it.
Stanford was also rather prone to central decision-making. Around 1983 they decided that every faculty member should have an IBM PC and arranged a cheap deal. (As I recall we paid a modest amount and the machines eventually became ours.) Later, they made a sweetheart deal with Apple and only wanted to support Macs. They were very slow to support Unix systems, even though when I got there in 1983 there were about 150 Vaxen, two running VMS, the rest Unix, and soon after that Suns, Microvaxen, and HP Bobcats.
Administrative computing was a different world, one from the past. Logging in to the admin system was kind of like "Voyage to the Lost World". I can imagine that the decision to go to outside suppliers reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of the internal administrative computing people to do the job.
Reminds me of the CAPSA project, Cambridge, UK (Score:2)
You can read the BBC article here [bbc.co.uk]... the project was late nineties, early 00's... cost far more than it should have done... and didn't work when finally brought online. It was also financial software from Oracle.
The compsci lot was never involved -- why would they be? It's not even remotely the same job.
The article puts the losses at 9 million GBP but I've heard much higher figures quoted. Strangely enough it was covered in some detail in the Software Engineering lectures at Cambridge :-)
You what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oracle licences cost a lot per year (Score:2, Informative)
So putting oracle onto even a workgroup sized SUN box (E450, V880) can run several hundred thousand a year.
Given the size of Stanford, the requirements for redundancy, many users requiring different database access, I would imagine that the licences alone between 1-5 million a year. That's 10-50 million over the last decade.
There are support costs, need for table locking, performanc
You can't automate a process that isn't defined (Score:3, Informative)
Our company licenses Oracle's complete system. During the latest upgrade to 11i, I looked into the possiblity of using an Oracle module for tracking prototypes in our developement lab. I submitted a complete process definition along with flowcharts and process diagrams. After about a month of communicating with various Oracle departments, they finally admitted that they didn't have anything that would fit.
A clearly defined process saved us from trying to convert our existing in-house system to something that wouldn't come close to meeting our requirements.
1) buy software, 2) make it work (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone mentioned the PHB problem. No doubt. PHBs don't understand the "make it work" step. I bought something, I'm done, right?
Very similar to Cambridge Uni in the UK (Score:4, Informative)
Paul.