University offers investigation into Oracle finance disaster

The orgs themselves are not always blameless. ERP is expensive because the orgs are complex, and usually don’t understand themselves. The kind of end-to-end processes that ERP implements cross organizational boundaries, which is to say departments that don’t have good communication behaviors between themselves and therefore don’t fully understand why they do things. This is the seed of disaster for any project.

And then Oracle specifically make this difficult situation worse by having supremely opaque product documentation, names, versioning, licensing, and a constellation of internal support teams (which are no different to the client orgs in that they don’t communicate well with each other either).

All these big failures are fundamentally failures to communicate the right information throughout the project. Nobody is willing to do the hard yards of understanding and mapping out end-to-end processes and integration points, and fitting them to technology components. They all think they can shortcut the process by starting with the technology and working backwards from there, because that’s what Oracle sales told them they could do.

I’m not trying to excuse Oracle’s actions here, but ERP failure is normally a two-player game.

https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house....

[0] https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/roracle-downloa...