It’s actually easy to sell shit software. The average person knows a lot more about cars, for example, thank they do software. I’m sure Oracle makes huge money on name alone. The IT manager doesn’t want to take a chance with some lesser name. Just get Oracle, then nobody can blame them when shit hits the fan.
Only incompetent people wouldn't blame the IT manager for choosing Oracle.
The answer is of course no.
The Oracle pitch is "We do this for Michigan State and can do X, Y and Z". That is true.
Oracle gets alot of shit for this stuff because they own the market for enterprise financial software. Their software is gross, they bought out the competition and generally suck, but that is what the market demands.
My uncle is a locomotive engineer. His railroad makes a conscious decision to remove any creature comforts from the cab, like a chair cushion. It's needlessly uncomfortable and is awful, but that doesn't mean that GE (or whomever) sucks. They delivered what they are asked to do.
One of the setups I come to almost expect in maritime accident reports is an officer taking a night watch, alone, while somewhat fatigued. Warm, dark, quiet. After a few hours the ship has drifted significantly off its intended course. For unknown reasons (the officer was probably asleep) no attempt is made to correct... When they do wake up, they often don't have good situational awareness, and their focus is on pretending nothing is wrong, even if they are in fact already in serious trouble and need all the help they can get.
Night-time railway accidents are less common in my country, perhaps because the relevant unions insist on proper "if you're too tired just go home you aren't fired" type rules to reduce fatigue errors, but I do recall a case where a freight driver was dipping in and out of consciousness. When he was conscious he could see a red lamp out of the window, signalling "Danger" ahead so he'd reduce the traction power. If he'd been less sleepy he'd have noticed those red lamps were not getting closer each time, they were moving gradually away from him. His train was on a steep climb, and he'd reduced power so much it was gently rolling backwards. Oops. Nobody died, that time.
WTF are the administrators paid for if not that? Isn't that literally their whole job?
The school cannot handle the requirements or implementation. Of course, but maybe a smaller, more focused provider than oracle can?
And yes, you have to be at peace with your data being god-know-where.
You can reference the Texas power outages. Just because the requirements were to fail in cold weather, doesn't mean it was a good choice
I wound up going back several years later when I was thinking of a different field and they had that trashcan CUNYfirst system. By then the UI was already outdated and clunky. I wound up with the wrong class the first time around because of some issue and have to have it changed post payment which was time consuming. I would have rather used the IBM's.
I used a class registration system that wasn't this and didn't mention a "shopping cart" metaphor anywhere, but the system was exactly the same. Why object to calling it a "shopping cart?
I can only imagine how hard it was to populate the available classes. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the huge administrative bloat in the various departments was people who's only job was to force data into and out of PeopleSoft.
There were a few dozen of us spread across the UW System who's sole job it was to extract and massage data from these databases... One, very large, central database that handled data for UW and every satellite college they had.
It's lazy UI but in some ways it's going to be more intuitive, not less, to any student who's ever used an online retailer before.