CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
pscbc.blogspot.com
pscbc.blogspot.com
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.
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.
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).
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.
E.g. Salesforce, Workday rising up to replace incumbents, but then themselves becoming stale.
This is for everything: pay, vacation, etc.
It is really complicated.
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.
A company doing payroll for us ("us" being a multinational company) asked for a "typical payroll" to start with. Fortunately we had experienced people on the pay side who discarded the company because of this question (for one they should know, and for two they should know that "typical" will cover maybe 60% of the cases -- I thought that this was an exaggeration until I discovered the reality of calculating pay in France)
A good company specializing in "pay" or "vacation" (which are very regulated over here) will know the "typical" case and the edge cases.
Beg to disagree. This is the complexity that large ERP firms handle and why Oracle, SalesForce, etc are expensive to implement. They figure out the commonality (if any) and build for it. Then they add on features specific to countries they target and then they add the ability to configure for your own situation (to a certain level).
PeopleSoft did this for Payroll and workforce administration which is part of how they cornered the market for HCM.
10 years ago or so, I asked a health insurance company why a specific digital form could only list up to 16 diagnostic codes (otherwise a duplicate with the additional needed to be created).
They thought about the question for a second, then said that's how many were on the paper form the digital system had been created from (35+ years ago).
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").
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.
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.
I recently sold my director on building some software from scratch rather than try to combine two commercial products together for some Frankenstiened solution. The motivation for Frankenstiening it is that we are paying for both services so we should use them (and at least one is very customizable). Only after 6 months of failing to get these systems to play together in an acceptable way, I finally asked a team member to spend 3 days building a mock up of a new app. From there it was quickly approved and we hope to roll out next month. I only wish I had done that sooner; we would have had way more time for development.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
Because it's a tradeoff.
If you do it right, 99% of the work has already been done for you by an existing SaaS or FOSS project, and "all" you have to do is customize it. And generally this doesn't mean "change the config" but rather assemble different building blocks into the right shape.
This can still be a multi-year project, even when you're writing almost no code. It takes a long time to understand an existing company's culture, processes, and needs.
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.
I would also say that painful, unduly costly implementations seem pretty standard for ERP products. I have heard such stories about SAP.
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.
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...
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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/...
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.
- 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.
>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.
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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.
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.
Hahaha recipe for failure.
>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.
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/upload...
> 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.
Why? They'd signed a contract with SAP who'd sucked up their entire budget.
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
In fact I'd say this is a better deal than the one the UW Systen got.
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.
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.
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.
https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contract...
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.
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.
And yes, it's ridiculous.
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).
The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.
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.
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.
And IBM and Accenture, and etc etc
Feels like this entire sector *should be* ripe for disruption by a more skilled and far leaner organization for far cheaper, but my impression is that the majority of these contracts are some "business/partner" relationship things, and those that opt for these contracts are performing CYA by opting for these companies.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you're not exposed to market forces....
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.
Kidding aside, where can I find one of these jobs? I'm burnt the hell out and would love to lick my proverbial wounds for a year or so doing this.
I had the same view going into this job though. Working with incompetent people may stress you out more than you expect.
Imagine the job security.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had to look it up, and I live upstate.
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.
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.
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/agencies/appr...)
$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.
Then you maintain it with a couple of senior devs at $1M/year max.
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.
(Also, most people don't agree they're paying Oracle $600M for this... there's no source, and it's likely significantly less.)
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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
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?
Why can't the CS department join up with other universities and have a bunch of students build it? Open source it.
This was to replace the previous system: professor John van Alstyne just did it over a weekend.
IDs were often lost and stolen.
But I'm sure the lock-in occurred long before the bill hit 9 figures.
As other posts have pointed out, it is unclear the 600M figure is accurate.
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.)
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.
Enjoy your hospital stay.
Full report here: https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/sr2004/2002-110.pdf
With that said this example strains even my ability to justify the incompetence angle.
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)
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.
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
they need someone to blame if something gone wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Governments should unite to create basic open source software and then individual organizations can tailor it to their needs.
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
Contractors would then be responsible for providing excellent support, not some huge bloated product.
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.
"Why Enterprise Software Sucks" https://x.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776?lang=...
I never post anything, I just have the account to open links people sent me.
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.
And it works just the same for Workday and ServiceNow applications. And TV remote controls...
The system was a disaster. It never worked properly. So the government is throwing hundreds of millions towards its replacement.
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.
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...
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.
Certainly one of the names of all times.