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
This is why I never, ever, buy or recommend software without actually using it along with the people who’ll be dealing with it everyday. “Oh, devs will have to install it on their laptops? Ok! I’m a dev. Send me a test license and I’ll see what it’s like.”
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.
In brief, administrators are tunnel-visioned on checking boxes without being mindful of the fact that if you only need 1% of the features, the other 99% represents unnecessary complexity that will directly impact the usability and maintainability of the "solution".
When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the academic sector is in such a mess at the moment. Sadly this whole mess is funded by debt handed out that’s not dischargeable in bankruptcy for degrees of highly questionable value. It’s really sad when you follow the money and think about who and how stuff like this is actually paid for.
The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.
This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators' fault- this is being imposed by the state university system. Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us.
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 don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.
>> Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
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.
When you see how badly most business administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the business sector is in such a mess at the moment.
If you've ever worked in a large corporation or government, you know that this is the norm. It's amazing that anything, anywhere, ever gets done at all in organizations larger than a few hundred people.
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.
Lot of people don't care about spending someone else's money efficiently. And in some cases spending more will make them look better and lead to better opportunities. And this happens on every level, lot of employees just don't care. And those that might probably focus on wrong things.
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.
I've worked in academia. I've worked in small, medium and large private companies and fortune 50 companies, and I've worked for small and large govt.
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.
I've worked in a large government organization (the IRS) and at a large tech company.
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.
Based on your comment, you've worked in 1 public and 1 private organization. Not sure this is the basis for coming to such sweeping and drastic conclusions.
We're all working from limited examples - this entire article is about only one. I know many other government workers in different branches who felt similarly.
> Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.
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.
Ineffective corporation will eventually be driven under the ground by various forces, protected businesses have 0 pressure for quality and effectiveness, so unsurprisingly there is little to none.
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.
Why does no one on the inside even seem to acknoledge is publicly (I've seen enough internal discussions in the private sector to know they do complain on the inside)? Let alone try to fix the dysfunction? Does someone high up have perverse incentive or are simply too conservative to risk chipping away at the problem?
I have found that most academics have zero interest in how the sausage is made. In fact, I would say there is a willful ignorance to understanding the intricacies and complexities of what it takes to run a University system and the precarious financial realities of most colleges and universities.
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.
I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount of inefficiency in the organization is insane.
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.
I'd love to get a job like this seems amazing. Imagine all the gold plating you'd get to do. All the experiments and optimizations. You'd have the best library website ever.
When you're on a team with 15 people, that means a lot of process to push through to get anything done. One of the other engineers was the owner for analytics, and as a result we had basically no analytics. Furthermore, the team lead would often say things like "developers aren't designers and shouldn't be thinking about the product". I wanted to implement a basic semantic search to help people find the resources they were looking for (#1 pain point from talking to people), but that was shut down at every turn.
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.
> 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.
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 would guess public sector, academia, and large, older enterprise software companies are most likely to be similar. Or just choose any product that is expensive and bad and apply there.
I had the same view going into this job though. Working with incompetent people may stress you out more than you expect.
The university I was at had this amazing process for internal billing. Everything cost heaps and required entry in an arcane system. If you could do something inhouse, you were supposed to, either though the cost was astronomical. A $100k bit of software from an extra vendor was definitely $200k+ once the various IT departments (there were at least 4) had done their bit. There were managers all the way down and all were very important.
I find it really hard to justify spending $600M on a system like that? Look, if you had 500 skilled FTEs working on the project for 2 years, at $250K per FTE, that would be a total cost of $250M. Say 50 FTEs for ongoing support at $12.5M/year or $125M for 10 years. So $375M.
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.
And yet 90% of all startups fail, which could also be seen as a indicating a certain level of incompetence in the private sector.
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.
The trick is the find some way that a vendor can monetize it. Sometimes you have management consulting groups building crappy unmaintained (except by them, if you extend the contract) OSS.
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
Pretending it is impossible to get a semi-democratic government to work for the people instead of just very difficult is defeatism. In fact, getting people to believe "It's hopeless" is a big part of the way bad governments maintain control of people, like in Russia or in the USA
I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm only talking about the situation in the US. Currently it is dominated by the billionaire tech and financial oligarchs and we need to do something to change it. It doesn't make any good to sugarcoat this reality.
I agree. Any tax payer money used for creating software should be required to be open source. Ideally, governments and similar organizations would utilize open source software, then use contractors to modify, support, and maintain it (again, releasing any changes as open source).
Contractors would then be responsible for providing excellent support, not some huge bloated product.
IF you go to a body shop to get a dent pulled, you will receive one quote. If you tell them insurance is paying you will receive a second, much higher, quote.
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.
Your analogy is somewhat backwards. Insurance companies squeeze body shops pretty well. If you go in there and ask for the same work you will pay more.
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.
Interesting. I've been lucky in that I haven't had non-cosmetic damage repaired, but it always seemed like there were several iterations when insurance was involved.
With Oracle? 400 Engineers is likely way to high, it's more like 100 Engineers and 900 non-engineers. Oracle likes to throw in a ton of people into contracts with lie that they will provide "white glove" teaching and various other things.
Regarding the other bidders dropping out, what exactly was the primary expense that gave it an estimated $1B total cost? $600M can build out a greenfield software platform, so there must be more to it.
> 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.
With that money, Larry begged Jensen to take it and deliver him the GPUs. Onto the new grift. In yesteryears it was database and now it is AI. Benedict Evans always compared AI to databases. Oracle of AI is THE Oracle of Databases.
I worked in IT at a CUNY school at the time. Just hilariously poor and unintuitive. Every student was given an Employee ID number. Course registration was basically handled by an e-commerce addon.
A bunch of years ago, at college, I built a class management platform for my university. It won me $1k (which was an insane amount of money to college me), and I met with president of the univeristy to pitch him on using it. They were potentially buying Oracle software, and I found myself up against them. At the time, I felt like this professor.
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.
They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M without thinking.
> so in perspective it's a very small amount of money
$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.
> 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.
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.
Well sure if you can manifest money like a daydream, then you won't have to think about it anymore. I don't know though, maybe there are some folks out there who do in fact spend time thinking about unnecessary costs?
My understanding is that this network of universities is in fact a bunch of individuals who sometimes care about costs they are generating for their customers.
I know hating on Oracle is en vogue, but I struggle to believe this $600M figure.
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.
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
Yeah seems like 50-100 % administrative overhead for each employee, hard to believe that someone would accept that, you could probably pay each employee a personal valet for that.
Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs.
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.
On top of that, digging into their manifesto in the page above, I found this startling and horrifying stance the PSC has
> 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.
Not quite true, especially not for the higher end research universities.
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
That's my dream. One day I hope to recommend someone spend more money on me because I suck at what I do. So long as it's not their money, they should be quite willing.
With government bureaucrats with no penalty for failure and no expertise in software development guiding the design? And “lowest bidder” contractors to implement whatever shitty design the bureaucrats came up with?
I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic. Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec, hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the users of the site had to do work every day due to legal deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.
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).
I'm reminded of the Oregon state health care exchange fiasco where Oracle took like $250M and never delivered a working product. Ended up in a lawsuit and a settlement.
> 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.
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.
I cannot imagine any college paying 600 million for such a thing. I suspect the writer is very much mistaken on the price and a bit paranoid on the College's motives. Perhaps it is 600 million over 10+ years.
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.
You are likely correct. My best guess is they hired someone in IT from outside of higher education that had extensive experience with Oracle and had deployed it successfully in the past and so it was always going to be Oracle even though it was a poor fit.
We don't know the true scope of this, but apparently $600m was low balling in this story:
>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.
-----
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.
Having worked for NY gov agencies for 7+ years, it's not that hard to believe really. Vendors overcharge crazy amounts all the time and get away with it without the gov client batting an eye. Experienced it first hand where I was on several projects where I did, without exaggeration, 95% of the work and my employer at the time charged $500,000 for one project and for another $750,000 in a single fiscal year.
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.
>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.
All things are possible. Here’s a scandal where the NYC government spent $700M to implement a time card system. CUNY has access to public authorities like the research foundation, which may fund stuff in addition to their appropriations.
If you think about, $600M is enough money that someone somewhere could create an entire new company and staff it with some of the best developers just to get this contract...
It seems like there should be 5-6 vendors of 'University HR Software'
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.
Well CS departments are rarely staffed by people who are interested in building actual software (if they were, they could just work in industry making significantly more money), and HR software is probably the worst vertical for a bunch of kids with no experience working in.
My school tried this in the early 90s: they held a contest to make class scheduling software. I don't think it worked out- I certainly did not enter it.
This was to replace the previous system: professor John van Alstyne just did it over a weekend.
to manage means to extract-value-from and $600M for software is a lot of value extracted.
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.
>> 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.
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...
it's how institutions work and it's very alive anywhere with inclusion programs of any kind. to hire managers based to anything other than strict hierarchical domain competence depends on the premise that managers are generic low agency minders of things that are already creating value themselves, and a transferrable/interchangeable function. nothing outdated about that at all.
I have been negative on Oracle since the ‘90s, when I had to work with an installer CD for Oracle software —- an official Oracle CD —- that:
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.
Garbage overpriced systems that everyone hates, and which substantially hurt the organization... How do you land those sales? (Joke: "Asking for a friend.")
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.)
1. Be willing to spend 5 and 6 figures (unreimbursed) responding to lengthy RFPs.
2. Work with an established Systems Integrator (who will take a large percentage.)
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.
> 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) […]
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
Sorry if that came around as rude. From personal experience I have not met any professor in my life who could lead such a project, let alone with students that don’t have any work experience… And you imply there should be multiple of them for the project to succeed
Someone has to maintain the code. Can you imagine making students doing that kind of work? They'd rightly asked to be paid for it. And getting faculty to manage the students doing that kind of work, they'd definitely want extra pay.
Does anyone know what "pathways" is and why they wanted so much central control to set that up? It seems that there was some sort of power angle to all this.
>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
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread---
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
"Why Enterprise Software Sucks" https://x.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776?lang=...
And it works just the same for Workday and ServiceNow applications. And TV remote controls...
https://unrollnow.com/status/1182635589604171776
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.
The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Governments should unite to create basic open source software and then individual organizations can tailor it to their needs.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
IDs were often lost and stolen.
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.)
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...
---
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/...
And yes, it's ridiculous.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
-----
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.
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.
>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.
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...
As other posts have pointed out, it is unclear the 600M figure is accurate.
But I'm sure the lock-in occurred long before the bill hit 9 figures.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
they need someone to blame if something gone wrong.
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
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.