Stanford Learns a Software Lesson

Nick Irelan writes "In 1994 Stanford set aside $60 million to aquire the latest financial and management software from PeopleSoft and Oracle. However, the upgrade that was planned years ago is still not complete. Stanford has even begun outsourcing! 'Those who can't do teach :)'."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

'Those who can't do teach'

As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems."

It would be prudent to consult several lawyers, accountants, and computer scientists before making such an IT committment, and it's quite an insult that they wouldn't have thought to go in-house for such consultation. This is *Stanford*. They shouldn't have any problem finding competent people in their organization.

It's really embarrassing that they got into this situation and they should suffer the consequences.

The professors should be doing an I-told-you-so dance. And the people responsible should be told to pound sand, if not pay restitution.

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[tachin]

Talk about wooden knives at the blacksmith's house...

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[Samari711]

In theory that's the way it should be. In practice (at lest where I am) university IT departments isolate themselves from the CS departments. There certainly is a lot of communication between the two but the priorities of the two groups are markedly different. generally if you asked for a plan from both groups the academics would give you a design that was implemented as much to standard as possible using the best of what's out there while the IT department would be a lot more focused on the bottom line and would most likely cut a few corners.
There's also a quite a bit of ego clashing because some of the CS profs feel that they could do a better job if they were in charge, and a few of them could be right about that.

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[Laivincolmo]

In my experience it has been that those who teach (college) would rather DO their own work and care less about the student.

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[kfg]

There was a story here on Slashdot a while ago about resistence to an "open source" solution to the educational intraweb at Princeton.

Said professor made the argument that a bunch of "kids" writing experimental software weren't qualified to write such software and that it should be left to the experts. Bear in mind that one of these "kids" is Brian Frickin' Kernighan who is a professor at Princton.

I did some digging on said professor who holds himself out to be an expert on web design. His online tutorial a)is some of the worst web design I've ever seen and b)was a pretty shitty tutorial.

A little further digging showed he's been in PeopleSoft's pocket since before day one.

There's a lot of politics in these things, and a lot of money flying around and buying opinion. As often as not the last thing those in power want is their own Computer Science people involved. That would queer the whole money flying around deal. Nevermind that it all, ultimately, has to be taken out of the hides of students and other customers.

KFG

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[Facekhan]

Yeah I took a required course that was about half web design last semester and she spent half the course teaching us frames and tables when she should have been teaching us css since half of us were already familiar with html and the other half knew nothing and could just as easily have learned css as html. And this was a part time professor who is supposedly a web project manager for a big comapany.

I am so glad I am taking time away from school at least this way I will not spend 3 years learning how things are really done after I graduate.

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[Tony-A]

There's a lot of politics in these things, and a lot of money flying around and buying opinion. As often as not the last thing those in power want is their own Computer Science people involved. That would queer the whole money flying around deal.

That's actually one of the strongest arguments for Open Source.
Even if the software were more expensive for poorer quality and even if the support were inferior, you'd still come out ahead. Seems like Munich went for the more expensive Linux option.

"In fact, the high-profile business battle between the vendors complicates matters. Each company's software is known to interfere with the other's, to the detriment of customers like Stanford."
Makes KDE and Gnome sound friendly to each other.

"For Handley, a big problem is that the software is designed to be used by public companies, not decentralized educational institutions. He notes that every ERP package he's worked with--Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP--has a single ship-to address in the purchasing module. That's great for a company like IBM, which is organized around a central receiving unit"
WHAT! IBM has one loading dock? He's been had.

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[Gonoff]

IME those who cannot do wear suits and become managers.
Those who cannot manage become consultants and wear even more expensive suits.

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[Apreche]

Problem is this. First off at my school there are two IT departments. The academic IT department where you get an IT degree and the IT department that makes the network go. There is also the CS academic department where I am getting my degree.

The IT department that makes the network go regards the CS and IT departments just like every other acadmic department. They treat them no differently. They in fact dislike them because:

a) they aren't as smart as they are
b) they give the biggest fight against stupid changes relative to other departments
c) they probably get paid more for teaching than doing
d) cs teachers only work 4 days a week

and more. So what does the CS department do? They make their own network and get their own sys-admin. They only interface with the schools network to take advantage of the internet connection. They could care less about anything that the school does with the network above them as long as the internet keeps working.

generally if you asked for a plan from both groups the academics would give you a design that was implemented as much to standard as possible using the best of what's out there while the IT department would be a lot more focused on the bottom line and would most likely cut a few corners.

You are implying here that making an implementation as standard as possible is the polar opposite of watching the bottom line. In fact making something standards compliant is synonymous with watching the bottom line, but only in the long term. But yes, what you say is true, the IT department only thinks of cost and the CS department would only think of quality. The reason that they don't choose an open source implementation is not because it isn't cost effective. It's because the IT department isn't smart enough to do it. They don't know about the tools, heck some of them don't know what linux even is. Most IT "professionals" are to this day just plain ignorant of what the deal is with open source. Open source is mostly a CS thing. It's a new way to make software. IT guys haven't made software a day in their lives. They are users just like home users. Their IT degrees signify only that they actually know what they are doing when it comes to using the software, unlike the home user who misconfigures everything and crashes left and right. The CS major is above the IT major in that they are expert at making and using software. However, the IT major knows things the CS major does not, such as networking and administration stuffs.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, this is just typical Slashdot editors just being mean and petty. Why the fuck to people read this shithole site anyway?

Slashdot used to be where knowledgable people shared their insights, now it evokes a big eye roll.

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[ironfrost]

The guy that wrote the article against Open Source wasn't a professor - he was the "Manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach". In other words, he was IT staff rather than someone from the CS department. The original story is here.

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[Anonymous Coward]

CS students on average know jack shit about writing software, networks, how to design operating systems, or how to build compilers. This is amusing because all of these topics are part of the CS curriculum, but are covered in such a watered-down fashion that your typical CS student doesn't actually know anything useful.

IT workers on the other hand are just trade workers. They're like plumbers, line workers, or what have you. I've never known anyone that's ever managed in "IT" (CIS on the other hand...) so I cannot comment about their typical understanding of their field, but if they're undergrads they probably know dick as well.

And most people don't care about "open source." Not in CS or in anything else, really. It's not new (free software is quite old, really), it just doesn't matter to people. Lots of IT workers on the other hand use free software a lot. It's completely trendy these days to have a "linux box" or ten; it has been since 1996.

Standards compliant is not synonymous with "watching the bottom line." You have no evidence of such a claim, so don't make it.

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[kfg]

Thanks for digging that up and clarifying that he wasn't on teaching staff.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that he was from the CS department though, he was their opposition.

KFG

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[JonnyRo88]

That's what I thought too. That sentence definately needs to be rewritten by the author. It could be that each office is set up with it's own peoplesoft instance, and they manage their shipping individually, but i really really doubt it.

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[vsprintf]

As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems.

True. According to the article:

. . . says Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999.

I had a math professor in college who claimed that psychology majors picked that field because they believed they'd be able to cure themselves.

Chris Handley, from the article: "Just buying the software does not solve the problem. You have to change the institution, and that's something Stanford struggled with."

This is the real problem with stuff like PeopleSoft and SAP. The user is expected to change their business rules to adapt to the software rather than the other way around. It's arrogant and bass-ackwards. Software is supposed to malleable and adjustable. That's why it's called software. Otherwise, it would be hardware or firmware.

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[maximilln]

'Those who can't do teach'

When I was young and cocky I prattled off that line. I have regretted it for the last 8 years. It's insulting, demeaning, and while it may be true in some cases, it's not true in nearly all cases and is on the same order as prejudice and racism.

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[thegrommit]

In practice (at lest where I am) university IT departments isolate themselves from the CS departments.

In this case, it seems the IT department was isolated from just about everyone. None of more common "best practices" appear to have been followed - e.g. users weren't on board with the changes before go-live, a "big bang" approach was taken on bringing in a new accounting system. Their gap analysis must have revealed that these packages needed more extensive customisation than usual, yet they went ahead anyway. That they might break future compatibility seemed to have been ignored/played down by the vendor.

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[belmolis]

The guy at Princeton who wrote that silly attack on open source was a computer services management guy named Howard Strauss. He is not a professor.

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[zakath]

"There's also a quite a bit of ego clashing because some of the CS profs feel that they could do a better job if they were in charge..."

...and the IT department could probably do a much better job if they had more money to work with. In my experience it's not that people *want* to cut corners it has more to do with project realities. You don't always get to do what you'd like.

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[Anonymous Coward]

"As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems."

Maybe that's a good thing. They're too busy experimenting with drugs anyway.

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[Eskarel]

Grad students aren't a whole lot better sometimes. I had a friend in a database class when I was still in college. The professor was actually quite good(one of those times when you get a class and you're using the professor's book because it's the standard text and not because the professor is a greedy bastard who wants to sell copies of his/her own book). The problem was that he had his grad students write the database engine which was used in the undergrad classes.

This was probably really good experience for the grad students, but it didn't end up with terribly reliable software. I still remember one particular bug.

My friend called me in because he was getting a seg fault he couldn't seem to fix. This segfault was on a stack declared integer, before it got passed to one of the dbengines functions it was fine afterwards segfault, couldn't even get it's memory address that seg faulted too.

How you segfault an integer I really don't know, but that wasn't even the weirdest part, if you made a copy of the integer at least after a certain point in the code, it would seg fault the copy as well.

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[iocat]

The real question to me, is why replace the mainframe system if it, you know, worked.

(The only answer I can guess is so that the new system would be fucked up, ensuring gainful employment for the IT department for years to come.)

My girlfriend's mom was a programmer at an insurance company, doing actuarial tables, etc, on a mainframe. Then they decided to replace it all with networked micros and discovered, after spending serious $$$, that their micro solution was a total failure, and despite their best effort, they hed to keep the mainframe -- and my gf's mom -- around for a lot longer than they expected. Lots of dough for the IT and CTO and Microsoft and Dell or whoever they bought the PCs from, no actual increase in productivity, or reduction in costs.

The only possible actual argument for the switch was that none of their new people knew enough low-level stuff to write good software for the mainframe -- you could argue that they had to switch to NT so they could continue to employ undereducated graduates, but that's about it.

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[Josh Booth]

At my HS we extended this a bit more, based on a few teachers we knew:

Those who can, do.
Those who can't teach.
Those who can't teach, administrate.
Those who can't administrate teach English.
Those who can't teach English teach Gym.

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[Fulcrum of Evil]

The reason that they don't choose an open source implementation is not because it isn't cost effective. It's because the IT department isn't smart enough to do it.

Close, but not quite. The IT department has a canned set of solutions based on the prejudices of whoever runs the place, and he usually formed those prejudices back when he was young. That's why you don't let IT do anything that requires innovation.

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[istaz]

Our university is also facing almot the same problem trying to move away from the dinasour. I think their main problem is they fail to see what they really want. The only people who can do the work is the university people themselves. To me oracle or peoplesoft are merely database, what most important is the application that talks to the database. These applications must be developed alongside with the users. Frankly, it is not that difficult to build. I believe the main problem is the bureaucracy.

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[Ctrl-Z]

It would be prudent to consult several lawyers, accountants, and computer scientists before making such an IT committment, and it's quite an insult that they wouldn't have thought to go in-house for such consultation. This is *Stanford*. They shouldn't have any problem finding competent people in their organization.

It should be noted that in many situations it is more efficient and/or cheaper to outsource solution development rather than developing it internally.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly why I'm scared of next school year. My university is going to be implementing a new PeopleSoft administrative product that is going to completely revolutionize how they conduct business.

Being as how its amazing most of them are even able to turn on their machines, this will prove to be very interesting.

Oh, and just to add, my university is being forced to change the way it conducts a lot of its business just because PeopleSoft didn't want to handle so many variables at one time. Those will be added later. Great software at work.

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[AdamInParadise]

That's a tad more complicated then that, you see. The main problem of "computerizing" business systems is that if you limit yourself to computerize the system as it is, your project is doomed to fail.

It will fail because instead of rationalizing a system, you just add a computerized layer of cruft on top of the total mess that most companies call "business processes". This has been demonstrated in a huge number of projects, both in the private and public sector.

So the way to success is to 1) simplify and rationalize the business system (that's called business reengineering) and 2) computerize the new system. Of cource 1) is much harder than 2), so many companies skip it and move directly to 2). At this point failure is guaranteed. If you go through 1) first, at least you have a chance.

Regards.

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[The Good Jim]

"A single ship-to address in the purchasing module". Total rubbish. This is hust worng, incorrect and ridiculous. I know nothing of Peoplesoft and not much about Oracle, but I know SAP, and - no problem. How many do you want, and how do you want them determined. By purchasing group? By organisational unit? By user? I have done all three, and others - and it isn't hard, or wildly customised. And you can change the ship to address based on whatever criteria you want, so long as it has room for an address. If the addresses are there, perhaps $2-3,000, from scratch or modifying an existing system. And SAP might be good, but I doubt Oracle and PeopleSoft can't do pretty well.

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[Maserati]

I've dealt with Stanford IT before. I have nothing but respect for the stundents, staff and faculty of Stanford. That said, their IT management are bloody clueless morons, actively committed to misserving the end users. Where a true BOFH succedes through skill and guile, the Stanford group stumbles along with sloth, apathy and ignorance.

This is the group that merged with the UCSF med school and failed. They had to undo the merger. I was on the UCSF helpdesk at the time (for that hourly, I'd almost do helpdesk again) and we regularly got calls from Stanford people who hod gotten sick of wrong or late answers from their helpdesk. Errors in the systems, data simply not entered, calls not returned, basic troubleshooting botched - we saw it all.

I am not at all surprised that the management team that tolerated that helpdesk turns out to be profoundly incompetent in other areas as well. Along with the project management skills of a herd of diseased elk they have all the organizational talent of a unicellular organism. It's honestly shocking that people like that aren't flipping burgers, not that they'd ever make shift supervisor at a national fast food chain.

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[Rubyflame]

Well, considering that teaching is something you do, the more logical conclusion is that those who can't teach will teach in the education department.

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[Anonymous Coward]

No, but you will get to spend 1 - 2 years after you graduate finding out how things have changed while you've been back finishing up your degree.

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[zyridium]

I find the real world process is more like a combination of the two. The essential component is that when doing (2) those involved realise that it is in the businesses interests to continually improve the efficiency of their processes. Implementing an inflexible system is the real killer. Non computer systems are inherently more flexible.

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[Satan's Librarian]

There are three broad categories of teachers I've found in modern academia. The ones who love the subject and love teaching it even more, the ones who love research, and the ones who got a degree and couldn't cut it, so they went back to teach.

The first group are rare,. They could make much more money applying their skills in their field - but are usually the most prized teachers. I had the fortune of having maybe 3 or 4 such teachers in high-school and college, and loved their classes. Of course, teaching ability and performance rarely equals advancement for teachers - we discourage these people even after they've become teachers!

The second can go either way. The research comes before the students, but some still make extraordinary teachers. They tend to advance in universities as a result of their research - something the previous group often doesn't do. Some barely notice they have students though - I had a few who loved reading out of the books they wrote, verbatim, every class, and thought that was teaching. I stopped going to those classes - I could read faster without watching someone else's lips move to the words.

And the third, well, they unfortunately seem the most common these days, and are at best baby-sitters in early education and a disgraceful waste of money when you hit college. Unfortunately, with the low salaries and prestige afforded teachers these days, them's what ya get.

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[maximilln]

nd the third, well, they unfortunately seem the most common these days
One must be careful when using such statements as "those who can't do teach" though. Imagine you're in the company of the first or second group, but you don't know it, and you're joking around with your buddy in class and that line comes out. It's just not a good situation to be in.

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[cammoblammo]

Same problem, another field.

I remember a few years ago when an Army base here in Australia was overrun by kangaroos (seriously!). They were everywhere, and the decision was made by all the various Government departments to hire hunters and reduce the number to a managable level. Hunters came in and culled the kangaroos as necessary.

About the same time an article appeared in the paper reporting that the Army was having difficulty finding suitable moving target exercises for their troops.

Okay, I can see some rationale behind that one. What struck me as really strange though, was that the same base hired private security guards to guard the entrance to the base.

Come on. I know our military's stretched pretty thin, but those are all things our boys and girls are supposed to be good at!

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[arkanes]

My employer is in the process of moving an old mainframe system to Peoplesoft, and I have to agree with everything you're saying there. I'm involved only on the edges, but everytime something incredibly stupid comes up it seems to be Peoplesoft's fault.

What makes this even worse is that we had about 80% of the Peoplesoft functionality we needed re-implemented in Oracle anyway, and we're now scrapping all that and re-writing everything so it can interface with Peoplesoft. In our homebrewed system if we screwed everything up and needed to drop all our tables and reload everything from the mainframe source, it took about an hour. The first load had some problems, after that it could be run unattended during overnight batch. When Peoplesoft screwed up, it took _48 hours_ for the system to be available again.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is the real problem with stuff like PeopleSoft and SAP. The user is expected to change their business rules to adapt to the software rather than the other way around. It's arrogant and bass-ackwards.

You really think businesses operate now the same way as they did 15 - 30 years ago when the legacy apps were concieved? If you think they do, then tell me where the typing pool and all the secretairies are. You're bass-ackwards, pal.

Software is supposed to malleable and adjustable. That's why it's called software. Otherwise, it would be hardware or firmware.

Wrong again.

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[Inspector Lopez]

And the third [category of professors], well, they unfortunately seem the most common these days, and are at best baby-sitters in early education and a disgraceful waste of money when you hit college. Unfortunately, with the low salaries and prestige afforded teachers these days, them's what ya get.

By and large, the new faculty hired by my Department in the past 15 years have all been solid cat1 (teachers) or cat2 (researchers) and occasionally both. However, we do have some faculty who teach poorly and do little research. As far as I can tell, these get that way by simply wearing out, or being overwhelmed by the march of progress in their fields. Being a successful professor is extremely hard work. There is a widespread perception that faculty are on the gravy train --- but most of my colleagues work extremely hard. However, it is quite possible that students may see very little of the result of that work. This is tragic.

The market forces on R1 universities strongly dissuade faculty from investing time in teaching well. This means that if any of you have had a class that you thoroughly enjoyed, you might want to take a moment to thank that professor in person. They are doing what they do for pure love, and very likely paying a penalty in salary, promotion, and tangible respect from their colleagues.

People who teach well tend to have a certain minimum set of organizational skills, as well as a demonstrated sense of responsibility to "the system." Such folk get asked to do some of the more important administrative tasks --- which are largely invisible to students.

Thus, universities contain several powerful mechanisms for removing capable instructors from teaching roles. I have yet to see any powerful mechanisms to actually retain capable instructors, or create more of them.

The current situation is very robust to positive change, for reasons which include the following.

• The faculty create and inflict promotion and tenure standards, and thus create a faculty which looks like themselves. Change a few words, in the previous sentence, and you've got a fine definition of racism.
  
• Departments are frequently financially starved, and need big flows of ICR (indirect cost return) to keep operations up.
  
• Many Departments have liberal policies permitting faculty to "buy out" of teaching. This removes faculty from the classroom, dulling their teaching skills, and annihilating one of the key selling points of R1 universities, "your son or daughter will be taught by the leading researchers!"
  
• Many funding agencies (notoriously DARPA) engage in university funding practices which are poison to education. To pick on DARPA for a moment,
  • They permit academic year salary (teaching buyouts)
    
  • They permit a salary subterfuge which gives unreviewed raises to faculty and chews up funding that could be used to support students.
    
  • They are extremely volatile, and think nothing of giving a grant of $1M, and then pulling it six months later. This is a completely irresponsible way to fund university research --- as if you could put students and staff in refrigerators between funding!
    
  • The "production pressure" is very large with DARPA, so that DARPA-funded projects can easily have large professional staffs and small student complements. This is because professional staffs, which cost more, can nevertheless get more done by virtue of their experience. But what is the point in performing university research without student involvement?
    
  
  
• the football team. Alumni and the families of alumni almost always care more about the football team than they care about the "university."
  
• ... and students are truly powerless. We do collect their opinions and teaching evaluations, and we even look at them at review time. However, I have yet to see anyone whose promotion was seriously endangered by poor teaching evaluations. It turns out that many students are perfectly responsible enough and capable enough to serve on promotion and tenure committees --- but I'll be Professor Emeritus before that ever happens.
  

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[vsprintf]

The main problem of "computerizing" business systems is that if you limit yourself to computerize the system as it is, your project is doomed to fail.

I don't understand that at all. A successful company/organization has business rules for a reason. "Computerizing" a business should not change the basics of how business is done in a company, only streamline and assist its operations.

So the way to success is to 1) simplify and rationalize the business system (that's called business reengineering) . . .

Sorry, I'm buzzword-intolerant, and that's the kind of jargon you get from the people selling these so-called ERP packages. No company should have to "reengineer" itself in order to use a software product. That's nonsense. There have been a number of spectacular multi-million dollar failures in SAP implementations. One size does not fit all. Software should help a company do what it does, not tell it how to do business.

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[Anonymous Coward]

A few notes, if you care. At the large (~30,000 students) university where I work, about half of the IT department (or rather, those that actually work on/with systems. Beancounters and secretaries etc. excluded) have CS degrees (or a related field, with lots of experience) and are quite adept at programming. The other half have experience doing high level stuff with ios that virtually no CS prof would. The IT department does more than just feed the pipe. We develop and run the portal, run the AD, the LDAP services, problem tracking databases, etc. We run two mail systems that would make many admins cry. Keeping an POP mail system with 100,000 accounts running smoothly is not something an "user" does.

The CS department, on the other hand, frequently has trouble keeping their systems running (when I was an undergrad, they ran their own mail servers, which tended to be down around 33% of the time) or performing basic configuration on their systems.

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[Anonymous Coward]

lol, its the opposite here. I use the cs departments mail server because it is rock solid running on a multi-processor Solaris box. I just have the mail that goes to the schools standard mail get forwarded to me. Those wusses couldn't keep their UNIX and VAX mail servers working, so now they paid for exchange and are switching everyone to it. Why didn't they switch to something else? I know people on the inside, and its because the guys working there wanted it to be as easy as possible for themselves. i.e: they don't know how to do it any other way.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck. Its been 5 years since the University of Michigan started to do their peoplesoft thing. Lets just say it hasn't been a smooth ride. While im sure the HR/Staff systems are a pain in the ass, they also contracted them "digitize" our phone based registration system. I can't remember a single registration date that something hasn't gone wrong. But hey, maybe you will be better off, since we were the premier site (cough alpha testers) for the software.

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[Phragmen-Lindelof]

We are starting to implement a SAP "solution" for financial aid, payroll, employee records, etc. (Wish us luck.) Before beginning this, the administration looked at current practice. It took about 70 steps to hire a new employee. Paperwork was processed locally, sent to the state capitol for signatures, returned for more signatures, etc. I think they reduced some of this (but I am not certain). Item 1) ("business reengineering") really can necessary.

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[Phragmen-Lindelof]

Many faculty do work very hard. I am trying to finish two papers before Tuesday (when I leave for a conference) so I can submit them to a journal editor (at Stanford); one is done but the other will be a week or two late so my coauthor in Australia can look over it. I have been spending about 18 hours per day working on these papers and I have not even written up the conference talk I will be giving in CA next week. Of course, I do not have a NSF grant right now and I am on summer vacation. (This is a normal vacation for me but I would prefer to do this stuff in Europe.)

There are some faculty who are lazy; they teach poorly and do not conduct research. I do not know what you do about them but I suspect that any "solution" would do much more harm than good.

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[vsprintf]

It took about 70 steps to hire a new employee. Paperwork was processed locally, sent to the state capitol for signatures, returned for more signatures, etc. I think they reduced some of this (but I am not certain). Item 1) ("business reengineering") really can necessary.

Constant process improvement should be a goal for any company regardless of whether it includes computerization. "Business reengineering" is something often pushed by ERP consultants rather than admitting, "Sorry, our software doesn't do that, and we won't customize it for you." I wish you better luck with SAP than my previous employer had.

Conflict of interest

[capt.Hij]

Three Stanford professors serve on Oracle's board of directors, and CEO Larry Ellison has pledged $10 million to the university as director of the Ellison Medical Foundation. Across San Francisco Bay behind a range of hills is PeopleSoft, which has been fighting Oracle's hostile takeover attempt for the last year.

Seems like there is a bit of a conflict of interest on all sides here. Big surprise that this is an expensive bust...

Re:Conflict of interest

[REBloomfield]

Here in the UK we're required to register our pecuniary interests at the start of each financial year. Our auditors would flay us alive if this sort of thing happened here...... And as an .edu admin, I can respond and say that it *is* the teaching faculty who make the upgrade decisions. They want the latest buzzwords, we do what we're told.....

Okay....

[Dachannien]

"Those who can't do, teach"

Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.

Re:Okay....

[REBloomfield]

No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords, and since three prof's sit on Oracle's board of directors, you can bet it was them giving the admins the orders....

Re:Okay....

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be.

Maybe the would actually learn something actually usefull to teach their students.

You learn by doing, not by deciding ahead of time what is the future of the software technology then teaching it as though it was a fact.

Re:Okay....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords

No one on faculty gives a rat's ass what purchasing and HR do, as long as purchases get made and paychecks get wrtten

Re:Okay....

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in IT's defense, I have heard of VERY few companies doing a sucessful Peoplesoft or SAP implimentation, and it ALWAYS runs up bucket loads of money in consultant fees, unforcasted upgrades (which are questionably necessary in the first place), over time and overbudget, etc.

Your best bet is always to look at what other organizations have done, study available 'best practices' material, etc. In other words, the school didnt do their homework!

Re:Okay....

[pjay_dml]

exactly!

and as uni's have been notorious for low pay, i suppose they don't have such bright people on their IT team, as they have sitting in their classes.

besides, usually IT teams have been set up for IT support. last time i checked, there is a significant difference between administrative tasks and software development tasks. we are looking here at two completely different sets of procedure.
how can anyone then be supprised of their failure?

taking the 'conflict of interest' into account, this just seems like another example of insufficient corporate governance. especailly as the modern uni is nothing but a corportion.

Re:Okay....

[smallpaul]

No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords, and since three prof's sit on Oracle's board of directors, you can bet it was them giving the admins the orders....

The people who buy 60 million dollar finance systems are not "admins". They are VPs or CIOs or COOs. They far outweigh professors in power in their areas of expertise. They would be flayed alive if they blamed purchasing problems on buzzword-happy professors.

Re:Okay....

[Dachannien]

The real question is, how many of Oracle's and PeopleSoft's execs and/or significant shareholders sit on Stanford's Board of Trustees?

Re:Okay....

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic. Michael, who is of course very well known for his amazing world class skills at... Ahh. Err, hold on, it'll come to me in a minute... impunging the skills of the faculty at one of the greatest computer science departments in the country. (Among them, founders of MIPS, Rambus, VMWare, Cisco, Sun, ...)

(Coming up next: Michael laughs at Andrew Wiles since he had to take a second pass to get all the details of the Fermat proof correct.)

Collective Hallucination

[philntc]

"Sometimes I look back and wonder if this wave of ERP software ... wasn't a collective hallucination," says Stanford CIO Chris Handley

That would have been Berkeley then, no? Home of LSD and UNIX IIRC.

Re:Collective Hallucination

[Anonymous Coward]

Fun as it is to say that, LSD was invented in Switzerland.

And UNIX was invented by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, although UCB did contribute a lot to its development (which eventually led to BSD).

Re:Collective Hallucination

[Defunkt]

In addition to that, LSD is no longer made in Northern California.

The main producer of LSD was captured in middle America a few years ago, with some number of billions of hits of the stuff. Since he was arrested and the product seized, there has been a terrible drought of LSD across the land. So, while the bay area was once a mecca for LSD production, it has fallen by the wayside and it seems that nobody competent or willing has stepped in to take over.

It is sad.

Re:Collective Hallucination

[wass]

Ah, Berkeley. Famous for ?SD.

Re:Collective Hallucination

[Nasarius]

There has definitely been a shortage for a few years, but hit up your local hippie festivals and you can find pretty much anything :)

Re:Collective Hallucination

[Anonymous Coward]

"That would have been Berkeley then, no? Home of LSD and UNIX IIRC."

This former Stanford CS prof did his share of drugs.

Re:Collective Hallucination

[Fulcrum of Evil]

That would have been Berkeley then, no? Home of LSD and UNIX IIRC.

You must be thinking of some other Unix (and LSD, too). Unix came from ATT. LSD came from Austria.

Re:Collective Hallucination

[some old guy]

To be perfectly accurate, Stanford was much more of a home to LSD than Berkeley. Ken Kesey was a Stanford writing student when he volunteered for CIA-sponsored, university-administered clinical LSD experimentation. With the profits from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" he bought his ranch house in La Honda just south of the Palo Alto campus. Berkeley at the time was much better known for noisy political thetoric than recreational chemicals. The rest, as they say, is rock 'n roll.

"Those who cant..."

[The Only Druid]

Nothing disgusts me more in normal conversation than this sort of bullshit parading as wit (its similar to 'kill all the lawyers' being invoked as the wisdom of Shakespeare, with everyone forgetting that the line is a description of the first step in installing a tyrant).

Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own? Go tell your parents, your teachers, your professors, your bosses, your friends, etc.

Pardon the vulgarity, but grow some fucking common sense.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

It's highly ignorant to assume that all teachers suck or rock.

Some are good, some are shit, it's depends on the individual. Generalisations benefit noone.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[bob65]

Thank you for expressing my exact feelings about that phrase. I couldn't help but cringe when I read it at the end of the submission.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Raven42rac]

afuckingmen!

Like another Shakespeare line "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Which comes from a play which upholds pretty much every negative stereotype people have held towards Jews (The Merchant of Venice). Out of context quotes are so passé.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[jfengel]

Merchant is, as a whole, rather problematic. You're right: it's a terribly antisemitic play. Except for that one speech, by far the best speech in the entire play. The speech is one glimpse explaining, more cogently than Richard III or Iago ever do, their motivations for acting like monsters for the previous four acts.

And immediately after it, Shylock is exiled (probably to his death), and his daughter goes off to participate in a one-act romantic comedy of mistaken identities which has nothing to do with the rest of the play.

So that quote is, in fact, quite in context, but the context is, uh, out of context.

I once saw a rendition with Hal Holbrook as a very troubled and sympathetic Shylock, and Holbrook's daughter as Jessica. They solved the problematic fifth act by having her be horrified at what's just gone on, as the audience's point-of-view character. It's not what Shakespeare intended, but it worked brilliantly.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

I've known teachers where this was very much true. I wouldn't say they're the majority though, most teach because they like teaching. I've known teachers that got fed up with the bureaucracy and left to get very nice jobs in the industry.

otoh, most of the technical things I know I taught myself. So yes, I do think I learned it on my own.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Like another Shakespeare line "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Which comes from a play which upholds pretty much every negative stereotype people have held towards Jews (The Merchant of Venice). Out of context quotes are so passé.

Yeah bullshit. I have way more negative stereotypes about Jews than were mentioned in The Merchant of Venice.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

(its similar to 'kill all the lawyers' being invoked as the wisdom of Shakespeare, with everyone forgetting that the line is a description of the first step in installing a tyrant).

Well, since the lawyers are fast becoming the
tyrants, wouldn't we be better off with dead tyrants
than live ones?

Re:"Those who cant..."

[jfengel]

What Dick the Butcher thought he was was getting was mob rule or anarchy, not a tyrant. I don't think Shakespeare particularly thought it was wise. He presents Cade as a fool and a dupe, but neither do I think he was aiming at "the first step in installing a tyrant".

'Course, Cade was sounding pretty tyrannical, what with the "felony to drink small beer" bit. But mostly Cade was just playing to the crowd, and apparently lawyers have been pissing off the multitude for a good long time.

Cade's Rebellion, if successful, would of course have led to a tyranny. He wanted to be king, and they wanted him to be king instead of Henry VI. They were all tyrants then; the world had no democracies.

Whether Cade would have been any worse than Henry, not a particularly tyrannical king, is somewhat immaterial, since Edward York was really behind it all and would have been king himself. But since that all led to Richard III taking the throne, well, now THERE was a tyrant. At least according to Shakespeare.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[rcamans]

Most professors and teachers are liberal arts teachers.
The liberal arts are people who draw, write, act, sing, play, and pretend to do, not actually do anything.
Hence the overgeneralization: those who can't do, teach.
And by the way, many teachers are bad teachers.
Almost everything I ever learned I learned on my own.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Noon - The mid-day hour

Noone - No description available

Nooner - What you might have a shot at when you realize that "no one" is two words.

Any you were bitching about what?

Re:"Those who cant..."

[StormReaver]

Given Shakespeare's rampant lawyer bashing in his plays, I'm highly doubtful he completely changed his tune for this one quote.

The quote was given in the play as a description of the ideal community if one were king. Part of that ideal is to kill all the lawyers.

It was hardly a flattering remark about lawyers being some type of defenders of justice. It was just the opposite: lawyers cause the injustice, and getting rid of them would return justice.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Sirch]

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" is a satirical quote from Oscar Wilde. And I agree, to some extent. Everything that I know well, I learned by myself, or for myself with teachers as a guide. The vast majority of teachers that have taught me have been pretty useless when it comes to something other than parrotting from a textbook. In some cases, I learned things in spite of my teachers' best efforts. Sure, I've had two or three really excellent teachers, so I acknowledge it's a stereotype.

The quote is satirical, but that doesn't mean it has to be true.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Any you were bitching about what?

Any - Not the word anyway

Any - Not the word and, either.

How's it feel to live in that glass house, Mr. Pot?

Re:"Those who cant..."

[tootlemonde]

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" is a satirical quote from Oscar Wilde.

The quote appears to be from Shaw's "Maxims for Revolutionists" (line 36, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."), which is an appendix to the play "Man and Superman".

It's doubtful that any of the aphorisms in the work reflect Shaw's own opinion outside of playful skepticism.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

So what school do you teach at?

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Thorstein]

Really!?!! You learned to read on your own? Without any guidance by your parents (playing the role of teacher) and later TEACHERS? You learned to read without picking up anything containing letters and numbers? Attention world: The great debate has been solved. We no longer need to argue nature vs nurture for this genius did not learn from any teaching. It must have been inborn, the ability to think and read and analyze. Behold this amazing anomaly known as rcamans.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Raven42rac]

That's slander, get out your checkbook!
<obscure Simpson's reference>

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

The line, at least in common usage, refers to people who are employed as teachers rather then being against teaching in general. A lot of people honestly believe teachers are on average incompetent and, at least for those in public schools, members of a union that doesn't care about students but rather in ensuring that regardless of their membership's ability that they should be relatively well paid and completely unfireable.

The 'kill all the lawyers' line, irrespective of its origin, is used because the majority (some would say vast majority) of lawyers are scum-suckers who screw over everyone for the enrichment of themselves.

So please do us all a favor and get some common sense of your own.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The quote was given in the play as a description of the ideal community if one were king. Part of that ideal is to kill all the lawyers.

You're reading too much into it. That quote was from the drunken ravings of a criminal - of course he wants to do away with all of the lawyers.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Belgand]

It is also, as people often fail to recall, highly dependent on the field you're talking about. Try taking that line out in one of the hard science departments sometimes. After all, not a hell of a lot of places for people to go around doing fundamental research.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I definitely agree with you. From my experience in college, atleast, here is what I conclude to be a bit more accurate.

"Those who can't, go into management/marketing"

I wish I was just flaming, but management and marketing majors are generally the people who can barely do anything right.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own?

People enjoy kicking their teachers in retaliation for all the times that the teacher had to kick their ass. The ultimate insult is to accuse the the teachers of being stupid. It's just for laughs. signed, a teacher

Re:"Those who cant..."

[rcamans]

I quite clearly stated "almost everything..."
If you had actually learned to read, you might have noticed that.
I only learned to read a little from others.
I learned the rest of reading from dictionaries and books.
Self-taught.
My parents were thoroughly screwed up, so I did not get much from them.
Much like many kids, I hid from them, and many others have had little or bad parenting as well.
I also had many bad teachers.
If I had had to depend on them to interest me in learning, I would have learned nothing.
As it is, books were my escape.
Apparently, reading /. and attacking others is your escape.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[Thorstein]

Just to quote you: "Much like many kids..." Ah, yeah, so not only are you an idiot but you're stupid too. I love being redundant. But, hey, You put it in much better terms than I ever could: "like I actually have a clue" You are right. You do not have a clue. Otherwise, you would have never learned to read for those who taught you. What you don't understand is that Teachers are those who Teach. It does not matter if they have degrees or jobs in education. If I meant education, I would have said education. Don't confuse teachers (those who teach) with the morons that were at the front of your classroom. And no, this is not simple semantics, they are completely different terms.

Re:"Those who cant..."

[rcamans]

No, it is you who are confused.
I hid from anyone who could possibly be anywhere as mean and screwed up as my parents.
I could not hide from the school system.
So the only teachers I had were those in the front of the classroom.
I also spent a great deal of time hiding from the students.
So no teachers to speak of, at all.
Except those administering daily beatings.

'Those who can't do teach'

[jeffy124]

how dare you suggest that Don Knuth cant "do"

Re: 'Those who can't do teach'

[Jerf]

Have you considered teaching a course in elementary logic?

Re:'Those who can't do teach'

[Bombcar]

Just because all those who can't do teach does not mean that all those who teach cannot do.

Proof by example:

All cats are mammals.
But, not all mammals are cats.

(cats = can't do)
(mammals = teach)

Re:'Those who can't do teach'

[Jerf]

Pity, seems none of the mods got my joke.

For all that people around here like to think that they are extra smart, subtle humor seems to fall pretty flat...

this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[johnthorensen]

Another PeopleSoft SNAFU is at the University of Missouri. They have been working on their project for > 5 years and are STILL using their old COBOL-based mainframe system. Millions of dollars down the drain because the pointy-headed academic administrators can't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.

-JT

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Anonymous Coward]

JT, I don't think its a question of leadership.

PeopleSoft sells a soft process to people and anyone who gives them money without doing seriously hardened specs before winds up being bled for years.

The consultants themselves are nice, but the 'peoplesoft system' does not guarantee results! they guarantee the process.. by which the nice people show up and burn your budget.

UoM is not the only entity that's lost its shirt because of this misunderstanding.

Just don't pay into the psychopathic system until they meet their mile-stones! .. uh, you say you didnt make it more that clear what you were buying? .. tough luck then UoM.. you've been had.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Vellmont]

Millions of dollars down the drain because the pointy-headed academic administrators can't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.


More like foolish top management believed Peoplesoft was the way to go rather than develop their own system in-house. The peoplesoft problem doesn't exist in just acadamia, it's everywhere. Acadamia is just more transparent about it since they can't hide everything under a thick rug like Big Business can. The whole idea that you can make a single system payroll/accounting/registration/etc system for ALL BUSINESSES and just add custom features is a foolish one.

The tranisitions for academic institutions has been even more problematic, to the point where several of the large institutions were considering suing the pants off Peoplesoft a number of years ago due to the whole system not working. They decided not to sue simply because they feared Peoplsoft would collapse under the weight of a lawsuit, and they'd be more screwed than before.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Jim Haskell]

You're not kidding. I'm a student at University of Missouri: Rolla, and we're the test-bed for the new PeopleSoft grade databases. (We're the smallest school in the UM system, so we're guinea pigs regularly.) PeopleSoft's system is horrible! The UI is lousy, there's debug info still littered around the entire thing, and it's caused numerous headaches for a lot of people. Don't buy PeopleSoft stuff if you can help it.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[ksheff]

New PeopleSoft installs aren't trivial matters especially when it still has to interface to several home grown systems. Depending on the requirements, it can take years to replace an old mainframe based system with PeopleSoft, SAP, or any other ERP product. That's why consultants for those products make big bucks (they better...working your ass off and living in hotels for years at a time doesn't sound like fun to me).

BTW, quite a bit of PeopleSoft is written in COBOL, so the mainframers will be happy about that.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. UCSC bit the PeopleSoft bullet 5 years ago and are only now starting to roll it out. Plus, the system is horrible and people hate using! It doesn't do 1/2 of what the old system did yet. Looks like it will take ANOTHER 5-10 years to get the PeopleSoft portal up and running, and by that time Oracle will have bought them out and killed their products.

It's not good to spend a crapload of money and time to standardize on one company's products--this is the very definition of vendor lock-in and I am sure has PeopleSoft SALIVATING over the profit potential of the deal.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Etherwalk]

Williams College has also spent millions on this over the past few years. It's taken a few years, but class registration is now moving off of the VMS box.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[mistered]

And the University of Waterloo, too. Here's an article from the student newspaper Imprint.

In a similar fashion they've completely butchered the co-op application process, too.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[paroneayea]

Good god. You have no idea how irritating PeopleSoft is to work with (unless, of course, you've worked with their software yourself). DePaul uses PeopleSoft for like... everything. And its frustrating to the point where I have considered writing my own version.

Really, it makes me realize why Stallman started the GNU project. God damn. I just WISH I could have access to the code, so I could patch it up. Do I feel my freedom restricted? Oh hell yes. Unfortunately, I am forbidden to make any improvements. Some parts would be so easy to fix, too!

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the tech support division of a fairly large company (don't want to say which). We rolled out PeopleSoft a while ago ago to replace our old customer management system, after an extensive customization-and-testing phase. It's over a year later, and it's only within the last few weeks that it's gotten to the point where it doesn't crash every 2 hours. And we're not using it for anything other than recording customer information and their problems. And the web-based UI is still slow as hell, and a general pain to use.

So, in other words: "PeopleSoft! For when your organization just operates too damn smoothly!"

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[mobets]

um me too... or at least my school UofH. They have the financials done, but they don't seem to have any idea when the student record stuff will be done.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Anonymous Coward]

Another SnaFU in the making is at SFU (Simon 'na' Fraser University), which recently purchased a Peoplesoft system. What a piece of over-designed, under-delivered garbage!

It has mixed up many accounting, payroll, and tuition owing (or rather not-owing) transactions for many students already. The web component only works in MSIE (even though most computer science students only have access to Unix and Linux machines, so they can't register for courses from their labs). It bogs down during the registration periods, belching out incomprehensible error messages that are of no help to the user whatsoever. When logging in, sometimes one screen shows up, but if one tries again, a different login screen appears (it looks like one that is in development). Simple tasks, such as finding out which classes are available, become a tedious slog through multiple screens, including a required search (where one must know the specific phrase used to refer to the semester). It has forced a change in the way semesters are refered to (previously 2004-1 would have been the first semester of 2004, but now it is some random number that does not seem to have any bearing on the year or the semester!). There is lots more wrong with it, but it is a very frustrating system to use.

To add injury to insult, tuitions have gone through the roof (90% increase over three years) while student services were cut back, and people who knew how things worked, were fired (because the new system can automate their jobs!) The old system, while stone-age, at least worked simply and reliably.

The administration of the project put out a survey to students about the new system (ironically, the online survey was being run by a research arm at another university -- because SFU couldn't figure out how to collect a FORM from an HTML page I guess ;-). The survey steared clear of any real issues (e.g., system usability, reliability, etc.), and instead, only asked if the system had the features the students wanted (The PeopleSoft system is full featured like a MS product: it has everything, including the kitchen-sink, but much of it doesn't work quite right).

I only wish that the SFU admin had to access go.sfu.ca everytime they wanted to collect their paychecks. At least, that way, they would have earned it! ;-)

G

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to put a number with john's statement. A quarter of a billion is in that drain. Yes, you read right.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[joshv]

The idea that every business really needs to do basic tasks like payroll and accounting differently than every other business is a foolish one.

The underlying problem with implementing these systems is not lack of software flexibility, it's the fact that companies fail to adapt their business processes to the software. They want to do things their way, and are convinced that their way of doing things is the best way. That may be the case in rare instances, but then don't implement a standardized ERP solution, and don't cry when doing things in a non-standard manor ends up being very expensive.

You might ask why PeopleSoft or Oracle think that companies should do things the way PeopleSoft and Oracle want them to. Because for the most part it will work. If you just take what the vendor delivers and try to adapt your business process to the software, it will work, and usually very well. Politically though this may be very difficult.

I worked at a company that had effectively hundreds of different benefits plans, because they wanted to be 'employee focused'. They'd spend hundreds of thousands customizing the PeopleSoft benefits system so that they could do a specialized benefits payment calculation that resulted in a 10 cent difference from the standard benefit plan. The company could very easily have simplified their benefits offerings and used the delivered system, and provided all of the flexibility employees needed. But such a decision was politically untenable, as the employees (and plan administrators) had grown to cherish the baroque intracacies of the plan.

Building your own in-house system will be just as expensive, if not more so, if your company fails to standardized and simplify it's business processes.

Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle

[SuperQ]

And again, at the University of Minnesota.. I know someone who works on new PeopleSoft installations.. to quote him about the U of MN, "That isn't my division"

I belive the U of MN cost of installation was doubled, becuase we had to hire outside peoplesoft consultants to re-write major portions of their code.

There something to be said...

[DeepDarkSky]

about being able to do partial rollouts of various systems, keeping loose coupling between them and planning a migration path that doesn't require changes to everything all at the same time. The problem with the "business software" and the required customization, however, highlights the problem with packaged, closed-source software. Open Source software does not require you to be at the latest and greatest version. However, software vendors are often only willing to support the newest versions and discontinue support for older versions.

There will be a great market for companies who specializes in supporting older versions of software that the original software vendor no longer supports.

'Those who can't do teach :)'."

[Baldrson]

If that's applicable to the Stanford situation then the Oracle development staff should be teaching at Stanford shouldn't they?

I mean, after all, it's not like John McCarthy wrote the Oracle financials package.

You know what they say...

[BrianGa]

'Those who can't do teach'

And those who can't teach, teach gym.
While those who can't teach gym, teach college.

Re:You know what they say...

[wkitchen]

Oh. I thought it was "Those who can't teach, manage."

They should make their own open-source software

[Anonymous Writer]

Surely the same institution that came up with a distributed computing software project such as Folding@Home can handle a menial financial and record-keeping software project. If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[KillerCow]

Surely the same institution that came up with a distributed computing software project such as Folding@Home can handle a menial financial and record-keeping software project. If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.

Admin would probably refuse to use it. At the University of Waterloo, they used to have an absolutely unusable dumb-terminal based system for posting co-op jobs. The students (who are renound at the undergrad level) wrote the school a new system and presented it to admininstration... at least twice... that is, wrote two different replacements. Admin didn't take either of them. They ended up taking a system from people-soft that was late and terrible to use. Administration has no respect for the work product created by their own students.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[beebware]

Yep, I know my previous employer lost a stack of money trying to use SAP and we ended up writing our internal internal system from scratch - as well as saving several millions, it actually did what we needed it to do (instead of having to totally changing the company working processes) plus it was completed within a year (SAP was being tried for 2 years+ and still didn't work as expected/promised!)

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[Henry Stern]

The above poster has obviously never ventured into the accounting department at a university and is merely saying the word "GPL" to karma whore. "Non-trivial" doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of what goes on, to the point that even humans can't get it straight. Just the other day, I had to simultaneously corral no less than 5 university employees to figure out exactly what was going on with my pay situation.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[prozac79]

If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.

Unfortunately, universities aren't software companies that work on application development. Professors don't have time to develop things like this since they are researching new technology, attending conferences, writing papers, and occasionally teaching. Grad students have their own research to worry about and don't have time to invest in application development. Undergrads are too busy getting drunk and doing just enough work to graduate.

I do have some friends who got jobs after graduation being software developers for the university. However, they were a very small group mostly writing tools that helped keep the school's computing infrastructure up and going. The people who could write an university-specific applications usually get jobs elsewhere that pay a whole hell of a lot more.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[Anonymous Coward]

I love this sort of attitude. It makes me secure in the knowledge that even though I don't have a Phd. I will be successfully employed for the rest of my life writing "menial" business software.

The thing that pointy headed people such as yourself don't seem to be able to grasp is that business software development requires integration with and expansion of capabilities of an existing business framework consisting of people, laws, and business customs, as well as real property and equipment.

Oh and did I mention people? People that have their own agendas (getting promoted, increasing power base, stabbing some other department in the back, etc...) And don't for some reason pop out of a mold all thinking alike with the same experiences about how things "should" be done and what works and doesn't work.

You ever create an Intranet? Simple right? An HTML monkey and a couple of script kiddies can create an intranet. Try doing it in an organization of 10,000 people that at the end of the project understand how it makes them more productive, actually are more productive because of it, helps them meet regulatory and financial reporting requirements, and doesn't take 5 years to implement.

Keep thinking that this stuff is menial so I can keep pulling down my salary making sure systems just like these are successfully implemented for large organizations.

P.S. No I'm not a project manager, I'm a coder. One that understands business very well.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[Tony-A]

The students (who are renound at the undergrad level) wrote the school a new system and presented it to admininstration... at least twice... that is, wrote two different replacements. Admin didn't take either of them.

"In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king."
But not if Administration is blind.
Administration is comparing course assignments with what the students are actually capable of doing. What the students are capable of doing when they organize themselves to do it. The one essential ingredient is that someone, singular and/or plural, must understand the problem domain.

Bit of a stretch, but I'd bet high-schoolers could actually pull it off.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[Tony-A]

"Non-trivial" doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of what goes on, to the point that even humans can't get it straight. Just the other day, I had to simultaneously corral no less than 5 university employees to figure out exactly what was going on with my pay situation.

It is easy to add complexity. It is extremely difficult to reduce unnecessary complexity. Open Source is not a magic bullet, it's not that simple, but something is not working right when it takes all 5, simultaneously, rather than any of the 5.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[michael_cain]

Surely the same institution that came up with a distributed computing software project such as Folding@Home can handle a menial financial and record-keeping software project.

Assuming that this is a typical situation where a business (and Stanford is a business, at least over on the administration side) is spec'ing a financial system, consider some of the requirements that the system has to meet.

• Thousands of employees must be paid promptly and the checks must be correct. The Congress and the IRS change the withholding rules regularly -- who will be responsible for making sure that all the necessary changes are installed so that the first January checks are correct?
• Once per year or so all the employees get to make choices about medical plans, etc. All such elections must be handled properly. Relevant information must be forwarded on some medium in the appropriate formats for the insurance companies, the medical providers, etc. Such information may come under HIPPA regulations -- are any of the students or faculty experts on those requirements?
• Lots of employees spend money on behalf of the university and then file forms for payment (eg, if you're on a trip and have to pay a taxi). The IRS mandates a specific audit trail that must be maintained by the system for such payments. The people who know the details of the audit trail that must be maintained this year tend to work for companies like PeopleSoft and the big accounting houses, not at research/teaching universities.

Without saying anything bad about the students or faculty of the Stanford CS department, who have done many impressive pieces of software over the years, they are NOT qualified to put together a system that meets all of the legal and accounting requirements. They are NOT organized to meet the ongoing support needs for such a system (as mentioned, who is responsible when the IRS changes 437 rules for next year?). They are NOT staffed adequately to produce and administer training for all the clerks that have to use the system. The coding for the system may in fact be straightforward -- but the legal and accounting requirements are definitely non-trivial.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god you are SUCH a fucking moron I can't believe you could say that and not die on the SPOT.

You think stanford is one software development house, and the same people working on the folding at home project are the same working on the financial software.

Stop fucking posting, you clueless spick.

THIS IS WHY SLASHDOT IS LAUGHED AT.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS AT OUR HOUSE.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[mostlyalmighty]

Furthermore, the Peoplesoft solution has just been replaced by a newer Peoplesoft system, customized in-house by the on-campus Information Systems group (which is underfunded and mostly unrelated to the Computer science department) to give new features which allow potential employers in on the wretchedness. Its like they don't even think about tapping into their own talent.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[eison]

You neglect the fact that somebody would have to support the student's system, and it couldn't be the students that wrote it because students graduate and move on. Development costs pale in comparison to ongoing support.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[tonydiesel]

Actually, Stanford tends to use a fair amount of student contributed software. During my time there, the students wrote the software that provided webmail access, course evaluations, remote login/printer accounts, an many other facilities. The residential computing group (maintains networks in dorms, etc) was primarily staffed by students and used all kinds of student implemented tools. Hell, I myself wrote some code for their undergrad advising center.

Some of the student SW was more effective than other bits (the webmail program sucked ass, but the rescomp stuff was pretty solid). All told though, students contributed all kinds of projects/tools for campus use.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[satans_advocate]

You neglect the fact that somebody would have to support the student's system, and it couldn't be the students that wrote it because students graduate and move on.

How stwange, I could have sworn they were replaced with new enrollments. Hmmm... a Educational Institution that opens, takes one intake of undergraduates, and then closes. What would they need the system for after that?

OSS

[blackmonday]

Seems like a great opportunity for open source software - the resources of the university, developers at large and oracle could work together. One of the problems noted in the article is that the oracle software was customized so heavily, future upgrades to the main project can't be applied to Stanford's version. Open Source it and some of these might be solved faster. I'm sure oracle makes a nice pile of dough on the consulting / integration.

Re:OSS

[Ohreally_factor]

Looks like you slipped past the naysayers above.

Among the objections:

1) Stanford University isn't a software company. Notwithstanding that it's patent portfolio is the envy of many companies, this argument doesn't hold water. To paraphrase another poster, Stanford isn't a janitorial company. Does this mean it shouldn't hire janitors?

2) Accounting systems of this scale are too complicated. Gee, maybe they should use computers, then? Ya think? I wonder what they did before Oracle and Peoplesoft?

Anyway, back to the idea. I really don't see Oracle open sourcing anything in the near future, but. . .

Given that Stanford has spent 60 million dollars on this, is there any reason why 10 universities of comparable size couldn't band together and each spend 6 million dollars on an open source inititiative? It wouldn't need to be directly tied to the various academic departments; in fact, it might be better if it weren't. Sixty million dollars could buy a lot of development.

I don't know...

[TamMan2000]

I don't know any PhDs, let alone proffesors, who specialize in the pro's and con's of individual applications. Most of them are far more focused on the science behind all of this stuff. They tend to leave the details of implimentation to the folks in industry...

and yes, I do work for a university.

"Those who cant..."-Migrate.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Those who can't..."

1. ...become politicians.
2. 
   ...become used care salesmen.
   ...soap salesman at a geek convention.
   
   

Funny. I don't hear any complaints.

same problems at BSU

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this article quite funny because my school, Boise State University, is having the exact same problem with Peoplesoft.

It's no wonder

[brainy blond]

our education system is in the state it is today with attitudes like this. Sigh. And we wonder why fewer and fewer people want to teach? Or at least fewer intelligent qualified people. If I have kids they're going to private school. B

Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Those who can't do teach...

I've read some ignorant things on /., but none as ignorant as this. Teaching is one of the most admirable things a person can do as it gives back to the community in every way, shape, and form. Those who 'do' learn from those who teach.

As a student I actually think that it is much more true that "those who cannot teach 'do'" rather than vica verca. Get some common sense before saying somthing extremely STUPID like that.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[pooh666]

Funny, I always learned from the book because the professors didn't really give a damn and certainly didn't have time to explain something to more than a very few people. So yes, I admire the books.. They have always been my greatest teachers..

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Not sure what school you went to, or what major you were but that is quite a shame. But being an instructor, when you could be making much more money , is one of the most selfless jobs you can take.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can't do, post on Slashdot.

Of course, you realise that "He who can does. He who can't teaches." is a quotation of GB Shaw, hardly an ignorant man by anyone's standards.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[skifreak87]

I'm not talking about the professorial level, but i've encountered many teachers who were downright incompetant (such as a 6th grade teacher who didn't know 8th grade math well enough to teach it to me, so i taught myself that year in math). We're not talking calculus or even high school level math. Teaching is admirable but many of my public school teachers were fairly useless (economics professor who taught so slowly i could read the book and teach myself in class faster than he taught. i've also had a small handful of GREAT teachers (almost exclusively in enrichment classes). Sadly these did not outnumber the bad ones. I would not generalize and say all teachers can't do but I also wouldn't say that all teachers are competant and admirable (my mom taught for a little bit. Most of the faculty where she taught - in a very good area, taught b/c of the "perks" of the job (light hours, esp after first year when you have lesson plans, good vacation time, total job security as long as you don't break the law). So forgive me for not revering teachers in general.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

I'm a college student right now and to pay the bills I work PT at a High School in LA Unified, and I can't say that I agree with you more. There are a few wonderfully dedicated teachers there, but they are definately the minority. Most public schools have become degree mills more than anything else, because of the quality of instruction that is required of the teachers.
My comments are generally towards University Professors, whom without, we would not have the internet, and other wonderous technologies, amongst the mostly wonderful instruction they give. Now I understand there are BAD teachers, and I've had some. But if our country disregards the importance of professors or good secondary school teachers, we might as well just give up as a country as a whole - because GOOD teachers as a source for knowledge is where our country thrives. Whithout teachers (good ones), all of us are nothing.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[brainsturm]

Those who cannot laugh 'bitch'

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

a lot of professors write books you know..

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[ip_fired]

I agree with you. I think one of the main problems with teachers at the University level is probably tenure. As soon as a professor attains his/her tenure, they basically will never lose their job no matter how many students level complaints in their direction. I know as a class we all signed a petition to have a teacher reprimanded for poor teaching (tuition is expensive! Why we wasted our money on that required class where we learned nothing is beyond me..other than to fill the requirement). It was completely ignored. Universities need to remember that the student is both the product and customer of the teaching. Too often they just focus on their research and let their teaching fall by the wayside. The teaching is much more important than any single peice of research that they may be doing.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

My Drawing III teacher was an amazingly cool guy, most of the others were just there to collect their paychecks. Nothing wrong with that if they're competent, but they weren't. I just transfered for my senior year, and since I didn't have a clue about which classes to avoid, I picked webdesign to fill my day. You can't even begin to comprehend how pissed off I was when we still hadn't come any further than how to open a fucking html file in adobe golive after 4 weeks. I asked if we'd be doing any html but the teacher just looked stupidly at me and said "why, we've got GoLive?". Of course, I knew html, php etc from before, but I was hoping to learn something about the design part, as in making good sites. I dropped the class. By the end of the year, the people I knew who had completed the class had just finished creating their own homepages on geocities.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

The thing is, its not funny.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Absolutely agreed. But I think the point is the quote is making a very broad statement about profs in general. Point being, the bad instructors (as you have described above) should be dealt with. I had one last semester who had literally 400 complaints on file, but was tenured so no one could do anything about it. But the really excellent instructors need to be recognised here and not discounted, as the quote does.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[fermion]

The thing that students forget, or never knew, or refuse to realize, is that learning is a two way street, and as you advance in education the responsibility for learning fall more on the student and less on the teacher. It becomes merely whining to blame the teacher.

In Elementary school you spend the day with a teacher and might get 5-10 minutes of personlized attention from each teacher. By the time you get to highschool, you might get a few minutes of personalized attention from each teacher per week. You can make that more by being a more active student.

In college the students who just want to be told what to do get no personal time with the teacher. They also do not tend to get anything out of the class because the come in with the attitude that the professor do not care and do not want to explain. While this may be true in a limited sense, it is not a helpful philosophy.

In fact you did exactly what you should have done. Go to the books and get other points of view. If you were not connecting with the professor, then he or she did exactly what they should have done, which is to send to get other points of view. Unlike your teachers, professors are not trained to work the issue from every angle until the student understands. Now that the student is in college, they are expected to have the skills to find the answers themselves. A professor merely points out a useful direction.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[ironfrost]

In my experience, most professors don't take the job because they selflessly want to teach. They take the job because they want to do fundamental research without the product-related restrictions of industry. I'd say that, if they were given the choice between teaching classes or spending the extra time on their research, 90% of them would jump at the chance.

I'm a physicist, so I've not got firsthand knowledge of what the situation is like in Computer Science, but I'd be surprised if it was notably different.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants to pay $20k a year for an professor to not do their job of teaching a subject. If you want to make up excuses for bad educators, then please refund six years of tuition. Thanks.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[jcr]

Did you get the phrase "vica verca" from one of those professors you so admire?

If you're going to use Latin phrases in your posts, you might want to get them right before you call anyone else stupid.

-jcr

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[TykeClone]

I'm sure that it's more selfless than being an EMT or firefighter.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Oh I'm sorry, I put a c instead of an s. Extremely stupid of me to make a spelling mistake, idiot.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

And the funny thing is I didn't call anyone stupid. I stated that what the author said was stupid, and might I add Ignorant.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Observe I wrote, one of the most selfless jobs you can take. Not, it's more selfless than firefighters and EMT's.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you go to school? Sounds like a place set up for, as Paul Fussell says, "going about usual business, ripping off the proles". You should have done some more research before choosing a school.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Deliberate_Bastard]

Funny, I always learned from the book because the professors didn't really give a damn and certainly didn't have time to explain something to more than a very few people. So yes, I admire the books.. They have always been my greatest teachers..

And the books were written by...?

Oh, yes, that's right, invisible fairies. How silly of me to forget.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[gregbaker]

A couple of other have pointed out that many University Faculty write textbooks. True.

I will also point out that somebody must choose the respect-worthy text for a course. Somebody also creates assignments and exams that will push students to learn the material.

After hanging around the front of lecture halls for a few years, I think creating assignments is the hardest part of the job. Lecturing is easy: put stuff together in a reasonably logical order, throw in some interesting examples, and try to finish it all in fifty minutes. Creating assignments and exams is horrible and endlessly time consuming. Selecting a text is hard becase so many are really, truly bad.

That said, there are, in fact, many University faculty do indeed suck. No argument there, but if you learned something from the course, it wasn't all bad.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

No one said anything about bad professors. It is just a matter of students taking responsibility for thier education. A professor is in class 3 hours a week. if you are an uber student you might see him or her at office hours or in the hall.

However, more most student learning goes on outside of class, where groups talk and debate and form the schemata and other structures that will allow them to understand and apply the material.

One of the biggest mistakes that professor make is not clearly stating the expectations on the students. Some schools do not understand that in the modern diverse university, those expecations are not already known. However, as has already been admitted, most professors are not trained to work the student from all angles.

If you learned, the money was well spent. A university is a resource, and most students, myself included, do not exend the energy to fully utilize the resource. Some students never see the library. Some students never form a study group. Some students don't pester and make friends with the graudate students. Sometimes the teachers are bad. Sometimes the student does not meet the teacher half way.

What I can tell you for sure is that what you learn in class may not be what you need to get the job you want, or do the work that is your favorite. But the university is not ideally a place where you go to get a vocational degree. It is a place to learn, and all subjects is interelated, and all learning, no matter if it is in the class sylubus or not, is important.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[jcr]

More like, extemely stupid of you to call anyone else an idiot when you didn't spot both of the spelling mistakes you've made after someone points them out to you.

I usually don't bother correcting spelling mistakes on /., but when it's coming from someone with your kind of attitude, it's too much fun to resist.

BTW, The phrase you were groping for in your comically semi-literate manner is vice versa.

Schooling doesn't seem to helping you much, kid. Have you considered a career in the service industry?

-jcr

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[jcr]

The funnier thing is that you didn't spot what the funny thing really was..

-jcr

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you think wrote those books?

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

At the university level learning is the responsibiliy of the student, not the professor. This should have been explained to you when you entered the university. It is really sad that you went through six years of schooling without understanding this fundamental point.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Usually those who criticize others for such things as the comment in this article, and in your case, have somthing lacking. Thus they feel compelled to pick on things that they could never attain (IE Professor Degree Level), and in your case, one letter spelling mistakes.
I'm sorry for your sadistic situation, as I truly hope you find what your life is lacking.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[doktor-hladnjak]

The teaching is much more important than any single peice of research that they may be doing.

Here's the root of the problem really. The tenure system is designed in such a manner that teaching is not the most important thing in job promotion. I don't want to defend profs who can't teach, but there is more to a university than just instructing undergrads. In Computer Science, a professor's research and its associated funding is essentially the basis of graduate education.

A university needs to have people who can teach for undergraduate education and people who can research for graduate education. Unfortunately, it's often hard to find one person for both categories. Some schools now have "research professors" (no or minimal teaching obligations) and some "teaching professors" (basically tenured lecturers), where they try to separate out the strengths of various people.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some books are written by the professors, other are written by industry experts. As for as computer science books go ...

I find that the books written by industry experts are usually much more in depth, have a much clearer explanation, have a better focus on reality, and overall are far less stuffy lending to quicker reads which do no put you to sleep. Overall these professional books show that the writer has actully applied the information, and it is not just some abstract theory they just learned.

On the other hand, books written by professors tend to show a lack of fundamental understanding of the subject, or the ability to present the subject as a student would learn it. These books are much more wordy, lack focus, lack concrete real world examples, the writing is much more egotisical (e.g. "the smart student would have noticed this or that"), are far less self contained requiring much more secondary supporting material, fail to relate corresponding subject matter, and so on. Overall books written by professors seem to show a lack of comprehension of the subject -- it is more of a gathering of information than a presentation of the subject.

Professors also like to add additional abstration to what they write -- abstration that simplifies the design is also enforced, without benefit, in the implemenation. I sometimes think that these professors don't know the difference between theory, design, and implementation. Often times professors will describe the implmentation instead of the theory behind it, which is almost a total waste. I might as well find all the research papers myself, and compile the information into a comprehensive form than try to distill it from the crud the professor has written.

But then again, the books are focused on two completely different markets. The books written by professionals have to COMPETE for readers money. The books written by professors have a constant market with known yearly demands. Students do not have a choice as to what material to use for class.

This lack of competition shows in the pricing models too. A typical book written by a professional sells new for less than $50 USDA, where as a book written by a professor typically sells new for greater than $100 USDA.

Universities are no longer places of higher education. They've become a business.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[pooh666]

Ok, lets just compare, cost of book vs cost of sitting in a university classroom.. hmmmm. I wonder why I am in class again?? Maybe they should just write books and tests?

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[jcr]

I'm sorry for your sadistic situation, as I truly hope you find what your life is lacking.

Yours appears to be lacking in education, judging from your misuse of the word "sadistic". What you apparently meant to say was "sad situation", but in an attempt to sound better educated, you opted instead for a word with whose definition you are unfamiliar.

It may also interest you to know that there's no such thing as a "Professor Degree Level", as well as to know that the abbreviation "I.E." is properly written with periods, since it is an abbreviation (Latin "Id est").

Oh, and BTW: the poster to whom I replied didn't make a one-letter spelling mistake. I'll leave it up to you you to spot both of the mistakes he made.

Cheer up, though! Remedial English courses are available for people of all ages.

-jcr

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

Again, I apologize for any hardships I've caused you by making a spelling mistake. Professor Degree Level refers to the only thing that professors can have and teach (PhD). I'm sorry you never made it that far, and I'm sorry for what ever your life is lacking for the need to attack those who you feel are superior to because of a simple spelling mistake.

I truly hope you find what your lacking.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[jcr]

Why would you imagine that it caused any hardship? On the contrary: I found your posts hilarious, particularly when you started trying to offend me.

With a great deal more practice, you may someday be able to hold your own in such an exchange.

-jcr

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. At the university level, there is time where a learner has to realize they've advanced to a point where there are no longer easy answers.

Everyone knows "those" students who whined and cried whenever there wasn't a precisely laid out roadmap to getting a perfect grade. When the exam happens, I'm sure they spent all their time forming their argument to the prof why they couldn't possibly have answered the question. They should have spent the time thinking about the question itself.

Unfortunately, there still exist too many profs that buckle under the pressure, keeping us company with these people even at the graduate level.

When you go have to go out looking (God bless Google and PudMed for putting trips to the library at an all-time minimum) for an answer to a question - you'll get the package deal of: a) your own opinion, b) one of either the answer or an opportunity, c) and a bunch of spare knowledge you got from all those dead ends (offer void where prohibited).

Bah - they might be better off

[MammaMia]

In my own experience with PeopleSoft at a major university, let's just say it can be rather frustrating. Yes there's lots of useful functionality BUT, the forced upgrades are more trouble than they seem to be worth. And some processes that ran perfectly on the old systems are glitchy as all hell now. And there's not much we can modify - just have to wait for the next so-called "upgrade".

Re:Bah - they might be better off

[Genady]

Speaking from experience on the other side of the aisle (Oracle Fin Apps in a University Setting) the grass is no greener over here.

Re:Bah - they might be better off

[ksheff]

What can't you modify? They give you the source for most of it so you can modify it to fit your environment and business requirements.

Some of the upgrades are necessary. Govts tend to get cranky if you're not withholding the proper amount of taxes. However, in my experience, it was always good to wait to apply the tax upgrades as long as possible because they would often include some bugs. I'd rather let the early adopters pull their hair out and wait for the resulting patches from PS.

Re:Bah - they might be better off

[MammaMia]

What can't you modify?

Oh, how I wish I knew the specifics. All I know is that when I'm confronted with functionality problems in the course of doing my job (benefit processing), I take my issue to the people who are supposed to know if it can be fixed. And most of the time they simply say, we haven't quite been able to figure out what this bug is or how to fix it. Or, we know exactly what the problem is and there's nothing we can do about it. Anything that could be fixed, they already did (so they say).

Makes me wonder sometimes, how well do they actually understand the code and how to tweak it? Or are they concerned that "fixing" one thing might fsck up something else? All I know is that two processes that are *supposedly* separate (benefits and retirement plans), shouldn't be adversely affecting each other. But somehow they do, and I've developed several workarounds to avoid and catch problems, but sadly for certain unfortunate faculty & staff, I have no way of ever catching them all.

Those who can't do, teach

[bob65]

I think a more accurate phrase would be,

Those who can't teach, do.

Many of those who teach can in fact do, and what the heck do you think teaching is? Is it not doing?

However many that can do, can't seem to teach. Which is why they pretend that those who can't do, teach.

Re:Those who can't do, teach

[quizteamer]

An even more accurate phrase is
Those that can do
Those that understand teach

Re:Those who can't do, teach

[bob65]

Those that can do Those that understand teach

Hmm, I like the fact that it doesn't really imply the two are mutually exclusive.

This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts

[Facekhan]

The DC public school system has had a similar project going on for most of the last decade that does not work yet. Also a large database, management, and payroll system. They are actually being advised to give up on it since they are now out of money and the citywide system will do a better job. But they don't even have the money to join the citywide system now. A lot of it stems from unnacountable and incompetent administration for large .edu and government projects that change specs often and insist on a lot of customization which then has to be redone every time they change the specs. They are also only interested in the latest buzzword instead of what works. The companies are all too happy to take advantage of the situation. In the DC case and in some other school districts they purchase systems well in excess of their current and future needs because they refuse to hire competent people for project planning and administration. In most cases the needs fulfilled by these systems could be done with very little customization and be planned and implemented in less than 2 years. Consultants can cost a lot but its a lot less than the cost of buying something that never works. One more reason why colleges are always so behind the times.

Re:This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts

[Anonymous Coward]

I am also in an IT department for a school system, so I'm very interested in learning more.

How long have you been studying the details of this project? What kind of accounting procedures are in place? Have they contracted out any aspects of the project? If so, which ones?

Re:This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts

[electroniceric]

I've actually been very surprised that there's been so much fuss about lead levels in water (which if you look at the statics are actually close to old EPA standards), but little has been said about the tens of millions of dollar literally thrown down the drain on this DCPS PeopleSoft project.

Anyone who's had any substantial interaction with DCPS (I went to DCPS through college) knows that the system's administration is miles beyond incompetent (the system can't retain a superintendent for more than a year). This specifically includes the school board and the city council. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to undertake a complex, incredibly pricey ($25M in schools is a pile of mpney), all-or-nothing effort in a system nationally renowned for disorganization?

To me the underlying message is not only that strong leadership is needed for these kinds of projects, but also the scope of work needs to be hemmed in very tightly before any work is done.

Re:This is common for large orgs, edu, and govts

[Facekhan]

I worked as a tech for a large private university for about a year and I was amazed at the complete incompetence of most of the people working there. The low level guys who mainly managed student techs and small departments and single systems were the only competent people in the organization. The Dean of Technology was an education doctorate hack who had no familiarity with what it takes to manage a 10+ thousand node network with 4 thousand of those systems completely insecure (the dorm student pc's).

When the viruses hit hard late last summer her solution was to manually install copies of Mcafee virus scam and windows updates on 4000 student computers dorming in the fall at a cost of almost $650,000 dollars. Students were without internet or lan services for weeks (till their ports were turned on one by one) to the point of professors having to postpone tests and projects. The first month of the semester was a complete wash due to her incompetence. In addition the quality of the temp techs was so varied we had hundreds of students whose windows installations died on them as a result of installing mcaffee over norton.

They could have saved a lot of time and money installing anti-virus appliances at the building switch blocks and blocking common virus ports.

Keep in mind when I say administrators in the context of this article I don't mean the sysadmins. I mean the college administration faculty and tech deans with no real world experience that decide these things.

I proposed this to Clarkson University

[Russ Nelson]

I proposed this idea to Clarkson University -- that it should become the first university to commit to 100% open source in five years. The president (Tony Collins) gave me the warm fuzzies and then dropped the idea like a hot potato.
-russ

Re: Knuth 'Those who can't do teach'

[e9th]

Yup. If he could start with something as mundane as typesetting and come up with TeX, just imagine what he could do with ERP :)

But why is this exactly?

[Dthoma]

Maybe you could've put a bit of meat into the article to explain exactly what the hold up is? Surely Oracle aren't going to leave their customers hanging like this, losing money!

Re:But why is this exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You are naive.

First, Oracle is paid by the hour for professional services.

Second, When the customer says they want XYZ added, almost any good business will try to deliver. That it will take longer is stated as well as implied.

Lip-service.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've read some ignorant things on /., but none as ignorant as this. Teaching is one of the most admirable things a person can do as it gives back to the community in every way, shape, and form. Those who 'do' learn from those who teach."

Correct. Now when are we going to put the deeds behind the words. Otherwise it's all lip-service. Powerful teachers unions, and don't care parents, and school administrations. Is this "admirable" profession getting a pay raise? When was the last time a teacher got a send-off like Reagen? More people cried when the space shuttle destructed, than when something bad happens to a teacher. Columbine was more about the kids, than any of the teachers that died. We talk "Noble profession", but that's the extent of that.

What about those who teach AND do?

[nathansu]

Humoring the author here, what about the professors that do both? Plenty of my professors teach during the day/at night and work at JPL or other research firms in the LA area. Not sure where your ignorance is coming from, but it's quite unfounded about the teaching community, in general.

Or..

[MrPerfekt]

Those that can't make the news, submit the news!

Re:Or..

[mandalayx]

Then what follows clearly is...

Those who can't post, moderate!

Those that can't teach...

[Anonymous Coward]

administer.

hahaha

[dtfinch]

So that's why Stanford costs so much. Not better quality, just higher costs due to poor budgeting and incompetence. Nobody should spend $60 million over 10 years on something they could probably do in house for $500k in just one.

For their price they could have had 600 programmers for a year, or 60 for 10 years. Seeing that it's still not done, I doubt they had even a single good programmer on average working on their project for the majority of its lifetime. Maybe someone who could do what'd take a normal programmer a week, spread over a year, for the price $6m a year (Though I doubt he could have been paid more than $30/hr). Oracle & PeopleSoft might call this a spectacular success.

Re:hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, $500k in one year? Great! What features do you think can be delivered for $500k? What kind of hardware will we need to buy? Will it conform to all laws, regulations, and university policy?

Re:hahaha

[aldoman]

While it's very easy to say 'throw more programmers at the problem' it's actually a far more challenging problem in the first place.

Usually places like these have tens, if not hundreads of different systems that need to be migrated and then new relationships written between them. 'Business' logic is my most hated section of programming because you need to confirm exactly to the old system otherwise you will get your ass whined right off, even if the old system is absolute shit.

Now you are saying you could have 600 programmers for one year. You are forgetting hardware and misc costs which eat into it. You'll also need at least 75 managers for 600 programmers, which will cost at least the same or musch higher. Then also who wants to start on a project with a tight deadline and you are going to be disposed of straight after? Temporary work usually gets much worse staff...

More appropriately...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can't do post "witty" comments on Slashdot.

$60 million???

[Doppler00]

How many fully paid student scholorships could have that money have bought?

Headline Stanford

[Duncan3]

For the first time in history, a corporation has screwed over a university...

Get over it people, corporations are legally required to earn money for their shareholders by any means possible. They do this to universities EVERY DAY.

Re:Headline Stanford

[miu]

Get over it people, corporations are legally required to earn money for their shareholders by any means possible. They do this to universities EVERY DAY.

Bullshit. There is no requirement that corporations engage in illegal or unethical business to make money. The executive team is installed by the board to increase the value of the company, but executives are under no obligation to do so by any means possible. Despite the legal fiction that a corporation is an indivual, the excutives make the decisions that steer the corporation and those executives are bound by ethics and the law.

We need to have a yearly scoring system of some sort for corporations, and the scoring history made available to any potential customers. Were actual case histories with real migration/install success rates (not salesman numbers) available then customers would have a better chance of making an informed decision regarding a vendor's ability to keep their promises.

omg ror lolf "those who can't do..." biters

[Anonymous Coward]

would this be one time that posting YHBT YHL HAND is on-topic, since the bait is in the article summary?

Are PeopleSoft not being sued?

[lxt]

Aren't PeopleSoft already being sued by Cleveland State University for $510 million over claimed breach of contract and fraud. The university is claiming that software developed by PeopleSoft was missing specified features, and as a result has caused disruption to the admissions process...

Re:Are PeopleSoft not being sued?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't IBM being sued?
Aren't SCO suing them?
Aren't the Apache Foundation competing with JBoss
Aren't JBoss being lambasted for their non-apology?
Aren't FSF having a plain-ish looking website?
Aren't I cool, too?

Aren't we done with the hipster corporate plural?

Re:Are PeopleSoft not being sued?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Aren't we done with the hipster corporate plural?" ... or maybe he's British, and you're an idiot.

still not complete.

[Moderation abuser]

Frankly, there's absolutely nothing unusual about this. The general level of management competence is such that, they rarely have any idea of exactly what their existing systems do or what the systems they are buying will do. I don't see why an educational establishment would be any different.

Not news or even remarkable

[salesgeek]

A failed or struggling ERP implementation is no an IT issue. Implementing new financial and business software is very difficult, especially in organizations that require multiple methodologies to manage money. Success requires that nearly every employee change some facet of their job... and when you look at a university that is a staggering number of people.

Fast moving private corporations struggle with ERP implementations - some even go out of business and blame it on the software... when in reality the problem was millions of threads holding gulliver down.

teaching

[Anonymous Coward]

teachers dont do their jobs to earn lots of cash, however you do, which makes you a prostitute or a whore

Academics don't do admin work

[baomike]

The admin people (accounting, personnel, admin data
processing) never talk to the academics. It is just not done.
After a number is major systems at the U of O (over 27 years) I can tell you,it doesn't happen.
The academics may not even be aware a system is changing until their secretary can't log on( or more likely is gone for training).

Another example of the core problem

[Chief Crazy Chicken]

The biggest problem today in business with respect to software is that people in business don't understand that the reason you have software in a business at all is to make the processes of that business more effective.

Instead, there is a notion that "well, our competitors have it", or "we have to have it or we'll go out of business".

If you're just playing catch-up with your competitors, you aren't. There's certainly no innovation going on in your company, and beyond that you have no competetive advantage. That would be "stuff that makes you DIFFERENT".

So -- there's a fundamental perception problem. Since transitioning from a relatively advanced-thinking commercial development shop to an insurance company almost 10 years ago, I've been seeing this problem.

Given all of this context, the quote toward the beginning of the article by the Stanford CIO shows that Stanford also doesn't get it:

"Just buying the software does not solve the problem. You have to change the institution, and that's something Stanford struggled with."

No. You write (or buy/obtain if it's commodotizeable, like word processing or web servers) software that works to make the processes that you have more effective. Sometimes you need to make adjustments to have them work together. One case where you'd need to change is if you had a team of 50 people that did nothing all day long but go and pull index cards out of the card catalog in response to user requests -- putting in a database would require them to change this task. But overall, the process would be much more effective. Looking for a book (in this case) would remain functionally the same sort of thing.

The problem with software of this nature, or any "black-box-off-the-shelf" core business software is that it always comes with its own agenda regarding what the core processes of the business should be. To implement, the business has to change the way it does business in order to map into this new set of processes. AND often pay millions of dollars for the privilege. So, the business has just lost some of its competetive advantage (distinctiveness), AND has to pay a BUNCH per month. Plus they all come with maintenance fees now. On top of the original ridiculous price tag.

Why don't these businesses just write their own, you may be asking? Sadly, the answer is rather simple. In order to find out what you need the software to do, you need to get the users together and find out from them what they do.

First, this will take time. Generally, in a business, if you stand up and say "I have time to be able to do this extra thing" it translates as "because I don't do anything anyway", which is managerial for "I am an expense that produces nothing, fire me". So people don't like being put in that position. Second, it's human nature to not have a good idea what it is that you are doing. Go read about contextual design for discussion on this subject, and ideas on a method of getting around it. Suffice to say, people don't give good information when just asked -- they need to be watched. Which is time intensive (see 1 above). So, even if you get volunteers, unless you use the special tricks, you get bad information. Which leads to an incorrect product. See the last 20-30 years of "the software problem" for references here.

Sounds like a bottomless pit. The way out seems to me to be to get the users educated as to why the software need exists in the first place, then once they're educated, get them motivated to work together to discover what the software needs to do.

Easier said than done. Here're your shovels, get digging!

Re:Another example of the core problem

[Tony-A]

The problem with software of this nature, or any "black-box-off-the-shelf" core business software is that it always comes with its own agenda regarding what the core processes of the business should be. [Emphasis Added]

In the case of ERP software, that agenda sets what the core processes of the business will be.

In order to find out what you need the software to do, you need to get the users together and find out from them what they do.
Hard work, yes. Buying software is not a viable alternative. All you can buy is a solution to somebody else's problems. The hard work is necessary regardless. Otherwise you take Nieman-Marcus grade and turn it into Wal-Mart grade. And that's if you're lucky. (referring to merchandise calibre, not to management calibre)

People, Not PeopleSoft

[yancey]

The University of North Texas is about 60% through our own migration from mainframe to Oracle/PeopleSoft and I have to say that the transition is going quite well so far. We are already done with financials and inventory and many other parts of the system and are going live with registration this coming fall term. Projects are being completed mostly on-time and with relatively few problems. Now, our team did a tremendous amount of research before getting into this and knew much about the problems at other universities. It seems the problem is not the software, but the tendency of these organizations to continue doing business in their old ways. They try to force the new software to behave much the same way as the legacy systems they are trying to replace. From what I can tell, the problem is not with PeopleSoft or Oracle, but the universities themselves.

Re:People, Not PeopleSoft

[MammaMia]

I agree with you partially; lots of research & planning need to be done and you cannot expect everything to run the same as it did before. Absolutely.

However, when your organization is shelling out millions upon millions of dollars to replace old systems with new ones, isn't it reasonable to expect the new system to work better? Or at least that the new system can actually handle all the information the old system handled?

I should concede the fact that our migration to PS has, overall, gone well enough. My specific area has had innumerable problems with different processes affecting each other and just strange, unexplainable unfixable weirdness. People get kicked out of certain benefits for no apparent reason. And for many of these cases, we have NO way of knowing until the faculty/staff member calls us in (perfectly justified) anger.

They try to force the new software to behave much the same way as the legacy systems they are trying to replace. Somewhat true, but moreover, we expect the new software to behave in a way that makes sense!!

...Maybe that's the root of the problem after all. Hmmm.

Re:People, Not PeopleSoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"The University of North Texas is about 60% through our own migration from mainframe "

UNT's (formerly NTSU's) mainframe system was written by students from McGill University.

What's so hard?

[jfengel]

I've heard about many ERP nightmares, both with Peoplesoft and SAP. Even when they work, the projects are always incredibly expensive.

What's so frickin' hard? I am a programmer, and I know how hard programming is, but (correct me if I'm wrong) the goal of ERP is to use a single integrated program to do tasks that have been written a million times before: accounting, payroll, inventory, etc.

I can't help but believe that the problem isn't on the technical side but the business side: each organization has an idiosyncratic way of doing business and believes that it's cheaper to write custom software, or expensively adapt ERP software, to its specific goals, rather than doing things in a standardized way that can be assisted cheaply by standardized software.

When you bring a program like Quickbooks into an office, you're expected to do things its way, because "its way" is a collection of well-understood accounting principles. The more you try to customize it, the more likely that it is you are simply doing the wrong thing.

ERP is, to my understanding, a scaled up version of the same thing. The scaling will always make things difficult; large organizations are going to be more different from one another than small ones. It also presents performance and reliability issues.

Still, I've heard of so many failures costing tens of millions of dollars with these programs that I start looking to blame something other than the software and software developers.

Re:What's so hard?

[perlchild]

It all comes down to execution, not only do you have a frigging large target(to optimize what usually happens to be 30 to 90% of the target organisation's "operations") but you have to optimize also the entire process surrounding that. You also have to co-opt practically the entire organisation to your cause, because the organisation's productivity is usually a chain, only as strong as the weakest link. ERP is an attempt to organize production around software, for efficiency purposes, so writing the software is not so hard, writing the software that matches the organisation, so as to minimize the disruptions, the expectation mismatches and to actually increase efficiency and functionality is non-trivial(and yes, most of that is not, technically, software engineering, it's closer to industrial engineering or process engineering).

When you bring in quickbooks, the software keeps track of the activities of the company, and yes, it does introduce some changes, but ERP is both more complex, and more tightly coupled to the activities of the company. The biological equivalent of a new ERP install for a corporation is replacement of a sizeable amount of the blood vessels and nerves in the body(aka replacing the command and control, and replacing the logistics channels to function with the new controllers). The proper title for ERP integrators should be "Corporation Heart and Brain Surgeon". Maybe seeing that on business cards, admin would finally get the message about just what they are inviting consultants to play with.

Big Bucks for Stupid Bloatware

[skywire]

He [Handley] notes that every ERP package he's worked with--Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP--has a single ship-to address in the purchasing module. That's great for a company like IBM, which is organized around a central receiving unit, but ...

No, it's not even great for a large public company. It's unbelievably stupid. These vendors are getting the big bucks for massive ERP products containing everything but the kitchen sink, but when it comes to shipping and receiving, they typically just tack on a ridiculously simplistic toy module so they can add "Shipping and Receiving" as another bullet in their marketing materials.

Not just Stanford...

[Celvin]

This seems to be a normal thing... Three large Norwegian universities (the universities of Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen) signed up for a brand new personell management and whatnot system from IBM 5 years ago. It's still not working and has caused a lot of trouble for the universities.They were actually at one point unable to pay their employees.

Eventually they found out that IBM had stopped development and sold the product to another company, without telling any customers. I understand that they're mad.

The whole project ended up in one large lawsuit where the universities sued Big Blue for NOK 50 million (approx. $7 million). IBM ansvered with a counter-suit for NOK 5 million in damages. The case ended with a NOK 20 million settlement.

Ironicaly it seems they have gone for an Oracle-system after this...

Link to an article about the case, and one about the settlement (both in Norwegian) for those who are interested.

Shocking

[twitter]

"Sometimes I look back and wonder if this wave of ERP software ? wasn't a collective hallucination," says Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999. "Just buying the software does not solve the problem. You have to change the institution, and that's something Stanford struggled with."

Change an institution to match software? Why not change the software to match the institution?

the board of trustees since 1999 has been asked to approve $93.4 million in capital expenditures for applications and infrastructure . The trustees had approved $60 million in 1994 to overhaul Stanford's entire administrative information systems, a project they expected would take five years, even though controller Susan Calandra says some of the projects in the original plan were never started.

For $60,000,000 they should have a custom system that works with anything. Hell, they should have as much for $5,000,000. Now they want 93,000,000 more?

The delay has been caused in part by Oracle itself, which helped Stanford customize the software so heavily?changing Oracle Financials to accommodate the way Stanford redistributes overhead costs across its grants, for instance?that together they broke continuity with future versions of the software, rendering portions of what they put in place unusable.

I can't imagine something so poorly modularized. What's going on here?

The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"?installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on.

Oh, now I see they should have used free software from the get go and done it themselves.

Re:Shocking

[StormReaver]

Now they want 93,000,000 more?

Here's the really aggravating part: for $93M, I can put together a team of 100 (programmers, artists, technical writers, etc) dedicated to nothing but getting a fully functional, 100% customized to Stanford's business flow requirements, ERP system written and debugged in under a year. Each person would walk away with enough money to be very well off for quite a long time.

Whomever spent this much money with nothing to show should be dragged through the streets by rabid horses; and then bad things should happen to him.

Re:Shocking

[Hognoxious]

Why not change the software to match the institution?

What if the institution is doing it wrong? Perhaps you're the type of suck-up-kick-down consultant who considers "we've always done it like that" to be a business case?

Re:Shocking

[XaXXon]

No offense, but, no, you couldn't. You couldn't even get 100 people organized and figure out what repsonsibilities each person would have in a year. Even if you hired 100 people FROM PeopleSoft, you still wouldn't be able to duplicate the software in a year.

Even if you had some mythical group of 100 people who could communicate flawlessly and write perfect code, you couldn't get the Stanford administrators to agree on the business logic in a year.

Your comment reflects how little you understand the problem, the environment, and software development in general. There is no group of people, of any size, that could duplicate the system in a year.

It's the Staff, Stupid

[jonbrewer]

ERP systems implementations fail due to people and organizations, not due to technology.

Give a university administrator a system she doesn't know or like, and she's not going to put any effort in to making it work.

Give an IT department a mandate that they don't feel they had an adequate role in bringing about, and they're going to blame the technology, no matter what the real problem is.

Slap down a system made for a sane business in front of a university and tell that university to behave like a sane business in order to make the system work... well, it won't work.

Having seen PeopleSoft and Oracle Financials implementations from several angles, I firmly believe that the technology is fine - nothing spectacular or earth-shattering - but fine. The problem lies entirely with the organization implementing.

How to fix this? There's the ten million dollar question. A hint at the answer is this: look at Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft implementations in organizations with strict heirarchical (read militaristic) management. Success rates?

Re:It's the Staff, Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the consultants....

Having worked with Oracle Financials at a big UK university the amount of money wasted on consultants / consultant project managers was astronomical.
Some pulling in the order of 1500 GBP a day ( for months on end)! And managers wonder why projects run late....

we want to believe

[fermion]

I think is just another case of wanting to believe. I was involved with purchasing an ERP system in the mid 90's, and it was one of the reasons I was happy to leave. The purchasing decision was based more on bells and whistles than what it could do for the company. I saw no in depth analysis of how each piece of software would pay for itself, what would be required to get it running after initial installation, and or how a group of people who did not use computer would use this. Simplicity should have been the issue, but all I heard was 'Look at the pretty buttons' and 'Windows is always cheaper' and 'Thin nets are the wave of the future.'

One thing that was very clear to everyone who was thinking, even back then, was that an ERP would not pay for itself and therefore had to be bought on the basis on making life easier. Another thing that was clear was that you had to have a clear idea of how it would be used, and how much it would cost to use, otherwise it would never get used.

I saw the same blindness when i was working for a company that sold custom websites. Mostly we took a cut of advertising, and I suppose paid salesmen commission based on what we all now know is mark to market. At that time the advertising market was dying, and all the tech people, and even some of the managers, knew that the deals would result in no money. However that truth was not useful for the salesmen who wanted large commissions or the upper management that wanted large sales. So deals were put together that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to honor, with customers that made not commitments whatsoever. Of course all this came crashing down.

So, having worked in small business, corporate, and academia, I would say there is little difference in the ability to be blinded by greed and the smooth talking salesman.

The term you're looking for is "middleware"

[Moderation abuser]

Hey, IBM just won an award for their middleware system. The article talks about websphere MQ, but I'm going to assume it's YAMN for MQ Series. Odd that this never made an /. story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3797191.st m

BTW, you can roll your own to a large degree, (jabber, email, nntp etc) but it makes absolute sense to have some form of MOM in your organisation if you have more than a couple of systems.

ERP? Extracting Real Payola

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

When you repeatedly hear stories of companies having problems installing ERP packages, why should it come as any surprise that an educational institution for which the package is not designed has problems with it?

Personally, I think the person(s) responsible for specifying off-the-shelf software with some customisations should be shot.

I've worked on ERP implementations, heck, I've worked on ERP software development. It's all about providing a sophisticated accounting system with cookie-cutter business modules around it. Everyone has customisations on it, how large those customisations are depend on how far away you are, or want to be, from the template the ERP provider offers. Education is well away from what those templates offer. Probably so far away that you cannot justify the cost of the migration and customisations. That leaves you wondering if someone recommended the migration because it would look good on their CV.

Stupid !

[deniea]

In my opinion, they should use more of their 'in-house capital'. I'm sure they have business and IT related corses there.

By having graduate students have as a final project something like that, they can save lots of bucks on things like that.

Why shouldn't they ? I know my university does. It also shows in a way that if you prepare students in those fields, you are confident of their capabilities, e.g. the level of 'education' your own university provides is good enough for they big companies you are training them for to work later.

It's a 'eat your own dogfood'-kind of thing.

Re:

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Or our hero Andrew Tanenbaum. It was his "doing" that caused the entire AdTI controversy.

ATTN Stanford Students: AYSIANBTI !!

[Travoltus]

All your Student Info Are Now Belong To India!

Remember this when someone from abroad starts ruining your credit with SSN data stolen from outsourced student records.

Pray that East India doesn't treat you the way Dow treated those East Indian citizens during that little chemical accident a few years back...

Re:ATTN Stanford Students: AYSIANBTI !!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Pray that East India doesn't treat you the way Dow treated those East Indian citizens during that little chemical accident a few years back...

Would that be the chemical accident where DOW was required to use locals instead of their own trained personnel?

read the article and find out cause and cost.

[twitter]

What's so frickin' hard? I am a programmer, and I know how hard programming is, but (correct me if I'm wrong) the goal of ERP is to use a single integrated program to do tasks that have been written a million times before: accounting, payroll, inventory, etc. ... The more you try to customize it, the more likely that it is you are simply doing the wrong thing.

If you read the article, you see that they have a vendor cluster fuck going on. Versioning and custom software to fit the institution that break forward compatibility. They are right to demand custom modules. A university is not a corporation and operates on a different set of rules. Indeed, there's no one size fits all solution for companies either. A few different modules should not break anything and the problem is more between the vendors. Quoting the article, "The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"?installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on." For the money they have spent, they should have a working system second to none.

They should dump all of this expensive cruft and just go with free software. The solution they are taking now is "outsourcing" stuff to India. That will work if they free themselves from their vendor supplied nightmare.

Still, I've heard of so many failures costing tens of millions of dollars with these programs that I start looking to blame something other than the software and software developers.

The article also names the cost of this failure is around 150 milion dollars.

Re:read the article and find out cause and cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should dump all of this expensive cruft and just go with free software.

So then they'd have inexpensive cruft and for support they can scour the internet then be insulted and told to RTFM (which hasn't been updated for several major releases and years since everyone is busy adding more cruft to their fork.)

Re:read the article and find out cause and cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should dump all of this expensive cruft and just go with free software.

Do you know the difference between an ERP system and a spreadsheet? Thought not. Now FOASTFU.

Typical for ERP projects

[costas]

I've seen massive (multi-million USD) ERP projects succeed and I've seen equally massive ERP projects crash and burn. This is nothing new, and it has nothing to do with Stanford (yes, I am a Stanford grad): it has everything to do with how you approach the installation. Rules to live by when you re-platform ERP:

1. Find out what your business/organization want to do; what is the benefit of the change and what you are aiming for.
   
2. Find out what consequences your chosen platform has to your business: what things you can do better than before, what you can only do worse and what you can do that you could not do at all before.
   
3. Communicate the above to every department and every level in your organization. Have them re-thing their business processes along the new platform so that they maximize their benefit. In the process, they will "debug" a lot of the assumptions that were put in to the ERP specs and things will pop out before actual deployment.
   
4. Big-bang roll-outs are a recipe for failure: deploy the new systems in parallel for as long as you can, or if that's not possible, deploy in only some portions of the business. Absorb the cost of building temporary interfaces to your old platform as testing (which it is).
   
5. Cross your fingers.
   

Re:Typical for ERP projects

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it your didn't take any project management courses when you were there? The wisdom you share is taught within the first 5 mins of every project management course. I can't imagine anyone heading up a project of this size with no previous exposure to project management.

Re:Typical for ERP projects

[tcgroat]

6. Find out what you are doing now that will be more difficult or impossible to do with the new system.

7. Figure out how you're going to transfer all the data from the old system to the new, how long it will take, and how you will handle the accounting through the transition. Even if you do a gradual, non-big-bang transition your auditor needs to know which of the two systems contains the official records on any given date.

I've survived two corporate MRP system change-outs, and while both were relatively smooth and successful (the customers were served on time), neither was a pleasant experience. These systems seem to last no more than ten years between major disruptive upgrades.

Why is this news?

[xski]

Has anyone actually, ever, witnessed a completed Oracle applications upgrade? I mean outside of folklore.

My understanding is that these projects usually 'end' by management committee declaring 'We're Done' or maybe 'Mission Accomplished' or how 'bout 'major hostilities have ended' or something like that, as opposed to actually meeting original project goals.

-x

Anonymous for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes like this

And those who can't teach 'Administrate'

I've watched a large public school system try and adapt a commercial financial/HR package. What they are doing is rewriting it to match the mainframe program they are replacing. After at least 4 years and millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, it's still years away from completion.

As far as Open Source? They won't go near it because there is nobody to sue if it doesn't work. After all the administrators who choose it can't be blamed, can they?

If you want to understand large organizations, read "The Peter Principle" by Lawrence J. Peter. People are promoted to their level of incompetance.

Bay Area Talent Drain

[Ars-Fartsica]

If you can administer and upgrade this type of software in Stanford's neighboorhood, chances are you can get better pay at any of the hundreds of local companies that might employ this type of person. I highly doubt Stanford's salaries are competitive with many local companies.

Re:Bay Area Talent Drain

[evilviper]

That's not unique to Stanford, or the Bay Area. It seems to me that schools in general are just very low-paying, and interested in arbitrary status symbols, rather than skills (eg. hiring an idiot with a degree, rather than a dropout that can do the job well).

I've been around to a few different schools, and I can't remember seeing one where all their tech was done the smart way... Everything seems to be done the commercial-product package way.

If anyone can shed some light on why schools seem to be universally behind the curve, I'd be very interested in hearing it.

Re:Bay Area Talent Drain

[toofanx]

True, but there are many advantages of joining a low paying educational institution, such as steady work hours (evenings are always free), stability (very unlikely to get laid off). Basically, as long as you are doing your work reasonably well, you don't need to be worried about your job for the rest of your life. All this and also access to some excellent facilities, coupled with the excitment of being at the centre of academia can make such a job very lucrative - depending on one's goals in life.

Re:I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

What science? CS is not a science; it's applied discrete mathematics.

And what exactly do you think they study, if not the 'details of implementation?' Go look at Citeseer, and tell me those aren't details of implementation.

However what they are not necessarily experts on, is software packages.

Yeah, common problem alright.

[twitter]

You assert: A lot of it stems from unnacountable and incompetent administration for large .edu and government projects that change specs often and insist on a lot of customization which then has to be redone every time they change the specs. ... In most cases the needs fulfilled by these systems could be done with very little customization and be planned and implemented in less than 2 years. Consultants can cost a lot but its a lot less than the cost of buying something that never works

Blame the user, eh? Let's have a look at a few choice quotes from the article:

... controller Susan Calandra says some of the projects in the original plan were never started. ... The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"?installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on.

There might be some spec changing going on, but it looks more like the University got ripped off. The vendors not only failed to deliver what they promissed, ten years ago, they broke what they provided. The solution chosen, to offshore report writing, won't solve the vendor incompatibility issues.

For all $150,000,000 spent over the last ten years, they could have written their own system from scratch about 30 times. That would be a good use of consultants. I don't think the university got it's money's worth from the consultants who set them up for their vendor supplied nightmare.

Commercial Software Breeds Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

To twist Hanlon's razor as it applies to decisions when Microsoft, etc. "win" contracts:

Never try to explain otherwise what can be adequately explained with corruption

Get the fuck off of Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

You said:
"Nothing disgusts me more in normal conversation than this sort of bullshit parading as wit (its similar to 'kill all the lawyers' being invoked as the wisdom of Shakespeare, with everyone forgetting that the line is a description of the first step in installing a tyrant).

Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own? Go tell your parents, your teachers, your professors, your bosses, your friends, etc.

Pardon the vulgarity, but grow some fucking common sense."

Stop fucking posting. You make too much sense and cut into our sense of smugness and superiority to the sheepole.

Re:Get the fuck off of Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's sheeple you damn sheepole.

That's too bad.

[twitter]

I proposed this idea to Clarkson University -- that it should become the first university to commit to 100% open source in five years.

They must have thought it would cost too much. Anyone who objects on those grounds should be shown this $150,000,000 vendor nightmare.

The nuclear power plant I used to work for had spent $5,000,000 building custom software for itself with Powersoft tools. It worked beautifully. The administration types thought that it cost too much and fired their programmers with the bone headed attitude, "we are an electric company not a software company." Now they are putting in a fifteen million dollar commercial package. I'm not there anymore, but I'm sure it's going to be a dissaster. You have to wonder if they are going to fire their engineers and clerks because they are not an engineering firm or a filing company.

Just think of how much money everyone would have saved had they switched over to free software in the mid or late 90s.

Stanford not alone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problems that Stanford has encountered with PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP applicatons are in fact widespread across University campuses (though one would have thought that Stanford 'knew better'). The University of Minnesota, for example, had serious problems (particularly performance issues) with its PeopleSoft implementation and has been working with other universities to customize it properly for a university environment. These are complex and expen$ive software applications that turned out not to be as bug-free, flexible, and effective as promoted by the vendors. One also has to wonder how much the universities were taken in by the reputation of these software companies and their supposed ability to deliver a fully functional product. And who paid for all of the extra costs associated with fixing bugs and faulty implmentations!

Re:Stanford not alone ...

[m1chael]

Touche. My university went for PeopleSoft and are still paying [millions?] for it. But that's not PeopleSoft's fault. But these kinds of problems can be fixed by throwing more money at them ;P.

Re:I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously do not work in the English department.

Minnesota

[Mike Hicks]

A lot of places have had similar experiences. The University of Minnesota (which has one of the largest campuses in the country, though the overall statewide system isn't extraordinary) began switching over to a PeopleSoft system back around 1997. I'm not sure if it is complete yet, but I guess I haven't heard much about it for a few years (but then, I graduated a year and a half ago).

often research faculty dodge admin committees

[call -151]

One thing to keep in mind is that productive research faculty tend to be very adept at avoiding committee assignments that have little potential upside and are primarily administrative, such as one overseeing adminstrative computing in a case like this one.

I remember someone who was a reasonable faculty member who had been doing a good job as department chair, who agreed to become chair of a university committee that was overseeing a tranistion to PeopleSoft, in fact. I tried to talk him out of it and it did in fact become the huge morass with fingerpointing that I was worried it would become, but when deciding to do it he was sure this was a straightforward ticket to moving up the administrative food-chain to dean and so on. In my experience, research faculty tend to work much better in environments when the success is primarily determined by their own efforts, and being in a situtaion where you are depending upon an outside entity (particularly one from another (non-scientific) universe, like PeopleSoft or other huge corporate entity) is a recipe for disaster.

The point is that a university is a community and in general, people end up in different roles, perhaps at different times in their careers. Some faculty are effective researchers throughout their careers and would be unlikely to ask or be asked to serve on what I would think of as a "committee from hell," whereas others who are not contributing research-wise are often the ones who feel obligated or are asked to shoulder more of the adminstrative burden. Remember that faculty generally have no particular preparation in adminstration, and it is pretty random as to whether or not anyone works out well.

Stanford software

[belmolis]

I was on the Stanford faculty from 1983-1994. There was very little relationship between administrative computing and academic computing at the departmental level. (There was a centralized "academic computing" facility, run as I recall by the same people who ran the administrative stuff, that continued to be used for a while by the older-fashioned people in some non-science departments as others adopted PCs.) Administrative computing centered on an IBM dinosaur that ran a lot of locally developed software. Migration away from a system like that can be pretty rough, with data tied up in peculiar local formats, and a lot of the staff get very invested in it.

Stanford was also rather prone to central decision-making. Around 1983 they decided that every faculty member should have an IBM PC and arranged a cheap deal. (As I recall we paid a modest amount and the machines eventually became ours.) Later, they made a sweetheart deal with Apple and only wanted to support Macs. They were very slow to support Unix systems, even though when I got there in 1983 there were about 150 Vaxen, two running VMS, the rest Unix, and soon after that Suns, Microvaxen, and HP Bobcats.

Administrative computing was a different world, one from the past. Logging in to the admin system was kind of like "Voyage to the Lost World". I can imagine that the decision to go to outside suppliers reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of the internal administrative computing people to do the job.

Reminds me of the CAPSA project, Cambridge, UK

[26199]

You can read the BBC article here... the project was late nineties, early 00's... cost far more than it should have done... and didn't work when finally brought online. It was also financial software from Oracle.

The compsci lot was never involved -- why would they be? It's not even remotely the same job.

The article puts the losses at 9 million GBP but I've heard much higher figures quoted. Strangely enough it was covered in some detail in the Software Engineering lectures at Cambridge :-)

You what?

[Aldric]

Ten years for a glorified accounting and payroll system? That's just insane!

Oracle licences cost a lot per year

[CA_Jim]

Oracle's licence model was (and as far as I know still is) based on number of users, number or CPUs, speed of machine, etc.

So putting oracle onto even a workgroup sized SUN box (E450, V880) can run several hundred thousand a year.

Given the size of Stanford, the requirements for redundancy, many users requiring different database access, I would imagine that the licences alone between 1-5 million a year. That's 10-50 million over the last decade.

There are support costs, need for table locking, performance issues for a large database. Who get's called when the database doesn't come up at 3 AM after it crashes and the system won't roll back?

So 60 million doesn't sound out of line. The customer needs a database that can reliably handle billions of dollars a year, tens of thousands of payroll changes a year as students and faculty change, take on jobs, contracts, etc. Being a university and getting public money (Grants, contracts, etc.) their probably are requirements to maintain financial accountability. And of course, there are privacy laws to limit access.

The 10 year rollout seems quite excessive though.

Re:I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

If an English prof saw the horrible butchering of the language that goes on here, their head would explode.

(A = B) does not imply (B = A) 'Those who can't do

[wayne]

No one suggested that Don Knuth can't do, only those that can't do teach.

You can't automate a process that isn't defined

[dwkunkel]

These ERP implementations fail because each and every part of the existing process is not defined and documented. If the current processes are clearly documented, then they can be compared to the proposed ERP solution to see if it makes sense.

Our company licenses Oracle's complete system. During the latest upgrade to 11i, I looked into the possiblity of using an Oracle module for tracking prototypes in our developement lab. I submitted a complete process definition along with flowcharts and process diagrams. After about a month of communicating with various Oracle departments, they finally admitted that they didn't have anything that would fit.

A clearly defined process saved us from trying to convert our existing in-house system to something that wouldn't come close to meeting our requirements.

Pronouns as variables

[smittyoneeach]

The IT department that makes the network go regards the CS and IT departments just like every other acadmic department. They treat them no differently. They in fact dislike them because:

a) they aren't as smart as they are

I guess if the antecedents are treated as positional parameters, we don't get a read-time error here.

The hardware/software issues, at Stanford and elsewhere, are certainly challenging.
The real mother, though, is the people-ware.

PeopleSoft

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't suprise me. Has anyone ever heard of an instalation of PeopleSoft that works well or a situation where Peoplesoft software has really addressed all of the business needs. Peoplesoft sells there solution as an infanatly flexibale system that will bend itself around the way you do business. Once you sign the contract you find out that the ammount of consulting time required to make it work the way want it to will require an army of very expensive consultant or even worse, you pay consultants to tell you to change your business model to the way the peoplesoft software does things.

1) buy software, 2) make it work

[More Trouble]

Buying PeopleSoft is just the first step in a long and arduous path. Perhaps you've heard that only 25% of software is commercial? The other 75% is written to manage in-house processes, e.g., finance, HR, whatever the business is. This ratio is not substantively changed by purchasing PeopleSoft: as with most vendors, step one is "buy software," step two is "spend way more time and/or money making it work."

Someone mentioned the PHB problem. No doubt. PHBs don't understand the "make it work" step. I bought something, I'm done, right?

:w

It's the Software, Stupid

[RedBear]

ERP systems implementations fail due to people and organizations, not due to technology.

Slap down a system made for a sane business in front of a university and tell that university to behave like a sane business in order to make the system work... well, it won't work.

Sure, the people or the organization should be nudged toward change if they are doing something in a way that is contrary to the "sane" way for no good reason. But saying that the fault lies entirely with the customer is ridiculous. You can't stuff every business model into the same mold, but you can design software with enough modularity to be able to adapt to almost any business model, even if it's technically "wrong".

Any software that costs $150 MILLION DOLLARS to implement should be flexible enough to adapt to different types of businesses and individual ways of working. It's absolutely stupid to blame the problems with a system like this entirely on the end user instead of on the software. Let me say that again: ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. I don't know how that kind of expenditure on software could be justified even if it worked like a charm. And it obviously doesn't. You should be able to buy god-like, rock solid and infinitely adaptable software for that kind of money. Not something that "doesn't work" after several YEARS and is no longer upgradeable due to half-assed "customization" by Oracle that no doubt cost millions of dollars.

Sunguard Bitech

[Edward Teach]

They should have gone with Sunguard-Bitech.

Like, Man, we need to switch to Linux, Man

[Anonymous Coward]

.

Hippie found mumbling this to himself in the hallowed halls at Stanford:

Like, Man, we need to switch to Linux, Man. All our problems will be solved, Man.

. (Hippie turned out to be Tommy Chong, long thought dead.)

No conflict of conflicting conflicts

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard on National Public Radio that just being a member of the board of directors can pay at least $30,000 a year.

Add to this complaints by a former student http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932

and the acknowledgement by faculty in May 2004 of problems in the advising system http://www.stanforddaily.com/tempo?date=05-14-2004 . In a related article by Ray Delgado:

Acknowledging that undergraduate advising and mentoring programs at the university fall "below the standards" set in other undergraduate education reforms, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman announced several new initiatives that should significantly alter the experience for students and their advisers. ...

Bravman cited a number of issues that have contributed to disappointing experiences for many.

-Faculty participation in advising has dropped from as much as 48 percent in the late 1970s to 12 to 15 percent today, partly due to ever-increasing demands on their time.

-Some advisers complained that they were matched with groups of students with nothing in common with each other or their adviser and felt uncomfortable participating in the standard socialization events. He said some faculty also complained about having too much information to digest when they became advisers.

-Many students do not take full advantage of advising opportunities or resources. He said his own experience since 1992 has shown that 23 percent of students who had scheduled appointments with him didn't show up.

-Students are increasingly arriving at the university with complex personal issues, including many who take psychotropic medications, which add another challenge to a sound advising program.

-Too many over-corrective efforts for advising have resulted in too many specialized groups and a general sense of confusion for many students. Bravman said programs have been offered through residential education, the advising center and the office of the Dean of Freshmen and Transfer Students, as an example.

"We have added layer upon layer upon layer and one of the results of that is that there's a total information overload and a total block about where to go to get even the most basic questions answered," Bravman said.

Sounds like they don't know what they are doing.

President John Hennessy looks like he'll get even richer in this Stanford Daily article of May 21, 2004, by Michael Miller (emphasis mine, not in the original article):

In a separate development, University President John Hennessy took a position on the board of Google in late April, as one of three company outsiders that Google added to its corporate board before its IPO. Hennessy was granted 65,000 shares of stock when he joined the board. These shares could potentially be worth millions of dollars, depending on the eventual stock value.

Hennessy took the position--his third corporate board membership--based on his experience with Silicon Valley and technology companies, Stanford spokesperson Gordon Earle said. Hennessy cofounded MIPS Computer Systems in 1984, and he now also serves on the boards of Cisco Systems and Atheros Communications. Earle added that Hennessy would remove himself from any dealings that connect Google and Stanford.

Does anybody seriously believe that there's no conflict of interest? Hennessey's textbook (coauthored with Dave Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley) on computer architecture is taught using MIPS assembly language (MIPS is Hennessey's company). So in addition to earning something like $461,656 a year (http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/news/clip

Re:$60 million??? Well, at Stanford...

[Nom du Keyboard]

How many fully paid student scholorships could have that money have bought?

Well, at Stanford what, a hundred? If you include housing (Silicon Valley prices), and have you seen what they pay for gasoline in California? Got to include that.

Not all teaching...

[sashang]

'Those who can't do teach :)'.
It's unlikely that there is much communication between the people in systems support who are in charge of implementing the system and academics in the Comp Sci dept. Also the purpose of being an academic is not teaching. Academics don't get raises based on the quality of their teaching. They get promoted based on their research, which basically amounts to having papers published in respectable journals like SIGGRAPH.

Very similar to Cambridge Uni in the UK

[Paul Johnson]

For a detailed post-mortem of a similar project with Oracle Financials in Cambridge University in the UK, see this report.

Paul.

The horror...

[kabdib]

If Cthulhu wrote software, he might come up with something like PeopleSoft. It is unbelievably, unspeakably horrible.

Halfway through the install of it (about five years ago), with the manual marked-up and plastered with yellow stickies, and a voice mailbox full of offers of help from high-priced, pushy consultants, I realized what the profit model was: Ship crap, and charge oceans of money to patch it up in the field.

Say what you like about MS (right or wrong), this stuff is pure garbage, and you won't escape with your sanity intact.

You must have missed this.

[twitter]

Dachannien says:

Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.

You must have missed this in the article: Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999.

Granted, he's not an instructor now but he surely is responsible for fixing the mess and has been for five years:

Handley joined Stanford in November 1999 as executive director of administrative systems. Previously, he directed the national PeopleSoft Practice for Higher Education at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Before that he held positions at the University of Toronto, where he enjoyed a 14-year career as a psychology instructor before taking responsibility for university systems there.

No mention of a CS degree or any technical background, just an affiliation to PeopleSoft? Is this why Stanford has been screwed around by their vendors for so long?

The plot thickens, he's spoken at Open Source conferences! He should know better. I'd love to know what he said.

Anyone known anything else about Chris?

My compnay blew 200 Million on SAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, spent over 200 million as a capital expence to install SAP to replace our old IBM mainframe apps. Took about 6 years to do, during this time we had to run both systems. The "old" IBM way cost maybe 5 million a year including personnel to run and maintain it.
SAP may be nice, but it ain't 200 million nice. It does pretty much the same as the old system, with little "value added".

Re:My compnay blew 200 Million on SAP

[Hognoxious]

SAP may be nice, but it ain't 200 million nice. It does pretty much the same as the old system, with little "value added".

Either your old system was well optimised for your organisation (In which case, why install SAP?), or you hacked it to work like your old system. (In which case, why install SAP?).

Picture a field. A plough is hitched to the back of a tractor; the tractor is hitched to the back of a horse. A farmer and a mechanic stand nearby.

Mechanic: Why is your horse pulling the tractor?
Farmer: To pull the plough, of course.
Mechanic: Why not just pull the plough with the tractor?
Farmner: Tractor don't go.
Mechanic: [Examines tractor] Well of course it doesn't - there's no engine in it!
Farmer: Oh, the big metal thing up front? I took it out.
Mechanic: Why?
Farmer: [Sighs] How'd you expect my poor old horse to pull it with all that extra weight?

I agree

[comput]

I do work @ a college IT department. Some professors have no clue what they are doing. Some of the professors try to tell me how to do my job, but in fact they are completely wrong! Just think of this you are not going to quit your IT job just to go teach for 50k a year while you can make 80k. This is the main issue why colleges can't get good IT professors. They don't pay enough.

Maybe this called for an Open Sorce solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stanford had decided to change itself rather than the software. This meant relinquishing forever the convenience of technically superior mainframe software customized for Stanford.... "Vendors [won't] devote time to giving you those bells and whistles."

So far, however, each installation of Oracle and PeopleSoft at Stanford has been different enough that it's hard to establish best practices. The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"--installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on.

Now, explain to me again the advantages of proprietary software.

Are you a teacher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can't do teach :)

You obviously can't do - acquire has a 'c', meat head - so you're a teacher, right?

what went wrong? everything

[cratermoon]

At the end of the story is a "Base Case" for the Stanford PeopleSoft/Oracle upgrade. There are three "Baseline Goals" listed that are just the start of wrong thinking in a project so full of wrong thinking (if the story is accurate) that it could be used as a the basis of a study of how not to run a enterprise software replacement.

To start with, it was inevitable that the close connections between the Stanford officials and the vendors would result in management blindness to problems. Either they would refuse to see problems, or the technical staff would be under tremendous political pressure to hide the problems.

Another dead wrong move: the "big bang" rollout. Of course the helpdesk and support folks were going to be overwhelmed. Things never work perfectly in the beginning, and what might have been limited to a small troubleshooting effort if they'd done a limited, staged rollout swamped everthing else with problems.

The complaint that the software was designed for a particular mainstream business process and not well suited for a university is reasonable in some respects. Yes, for the dollars spent, the software should be more flexible, and it is unreasonable to expect a university to re-engineer its process to fit the standard ERP model. On the other hand, if, as the story implies, the people running the project didn't realize in advance that university administrative computing is unlike private businesses they were wholly at fault for problems. At the very least, had they identified the areas where Stanford's processes could not be changed to match the software's expectations they would have known to budget more for the customizations.

Another problem mentioned in the story is the apparent disconnect between the IT people in charge of the project and the people expected to use the product. There are multiple mentions of the userbase feeling shafted by the results. Any large IT project that fails to include input from the people whose jobs require using the system constantly every day will be a textbook failure.

The story also mentions the CIO saying, "Stanford should distinguish itself through teaching and research, not unorthodox administrative processes that software vendors could standardize and ultimately make cheaper". This is a form of the increasingly common fallacy of "core business" that pops up a lot in management. The thinking is that a company should focus only on being better at whatever business it's in, and that the "non-core" things, like IT, should be standardized and outsourced. The fallacy is that it is generally impossible to separate a company's way of competing in business from the way it is structured and the support processes it has created. As an extreme example, take FedEx. Nominally they are just a shipping company. They collect boxes, move them around, and deliver them. But it is impossible to say that FedEx would be better by focusing on better box-handling and buying some standardized pre-packaged logistics software.

The real core of the problems, however, appears to be the bottom line, as stated in all three of the base case points:

• Finish adapting financial systems to Oracle software by September, after five-year delay.
• Maintain quality of information system operations, amid budget cuts of 5% to 10% per year.
• Cut annual software ownership costs, which run up to 18% of purchase price, by outsourcing and thus licensing fewer modules.

In small words: do the same work with less money. Apparently, the rule of "cheap, fast, good: pick two" is no longer part of the vocabulary of management. Of course the users, and to some extent the poor overworked and underpaid techies tasked with making the steaming heap work, are the ones who actually end up with the burden of the cost, in money and time.

One final observation. Several slashdotters have commented on the apparent irony that a university with some of the smartest people in computer science screwed up this project so badly.

Re:what went wrong? everything

[mishikal]

One final observation. Several slashdotters have commented on the apparent irony that a university with some of the smartest people in computer science screwed up this project so badly. In fact, the faculty and students in computer science are possibly the worst when it comes to practical real world business software expertise. Yes, they do impressive work in computing research, but nothing in the curriculum and academic world is adequate preparation for the problems of day-to-day mundane IT software. Also, Stanford has a faculty senate, that the head of ITSS has to talk to and report to fairly often. They help set the technology direction, and they were a part of the "buy not build" decision that many now regret. Remember too that at the time the "buy not build" decision was made, the area was in the middle of the dot-com boom, so keeping employees who could write and maintain custom software was difficult at best.

Software at Stanford

[mishikal]

As a Stanford employee working for ITSS, here's my 2c on this article. 1) It makes no mention of the Opensource software solutions in place that have saved the university hundreds of thousands of dollars (For example, implementing OpenLDAP as our directory service) 2) The account of outsourcing to India fails to mention the fact that they (a) failed to meet their last deadline (b) Recent deliveries had issues (c) major security concerns about data The article glosses over a lot of real issues, but that is understandable, given the source they talked to.

Professors Never Get Heard

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt any professors were consulted on this project. At UCSB they just built a new building devoted to nano-tech. Professors from around campus sent input on how to build this new facility so that it would be environmentally friendly. The contractor either never heard their suggestions or just plane ignored them. So now the new buildings will be using drawing 1/6th the power off all other campus buildings combined.

University of Alberta is another PeopleSoft victim

[JonMartin]

Years back the UofA got sold on PeopleSoft, even though we had the people on staff who could do a better job inhouse. It has been an unmitigated debacle. Payroll systems are less reliable. Course registration is now a pain in the ass (before it was okay). There are some major security/privacy concerns. Last I heard the project was over 300% over budget, and that was a few years ago.

It's Chris Handley, Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The article spends a lot of time quoting Chris Handley, but it's only getting the view from the top. My brother is one of the IT staff at Stanford trying to get this monster to work, and the management of the project-- lead by Handley-- is a top-to-bottom disaster. This project was originally due 20 months ago! The writing was on the wall but they didn't acknowledge it wasn't going to roll out until the last minute, and got a one-year extension. Then it was going to miss the target AGAIN, and only managed to technically 'meet' the target because big chunks of functionality were left out. Heck, it wasn't user tested before it went live last fall, they just took the prototype systems and ran with it.

Handley and his people do not understand software systems, and they do not understand business, either. They set arbitrary deadlines, don't plan adequately for development, testing, and modification, don't listen to feedback from their users, work employees around the clock for months and then lay the entire team off when they're 'done', and then turn around and ask the next team to do the same... They don't understand the business model of the university because they've laid off the people who knew and developed the previous home grown financial system and ran it for twenty years. Management figured these people were dinosaurs, but they threw out the baby with the bathwater, which was the detailed knowledge of how the university finances ACTUALLY WORKED in the trenches. Now they're throwing contractors at the problem in a vain attempt to make it work, but the contractors only know their tools and few if any of them know how a university's finances operate. It's not just another business.

The only way to make it work is to hire and empower competent people and follow their advice. But Handley won't do that because they'd say the first thing to do is to throw him and his lackeys out, and restore some morale to the place.

Re:It's Chris Handley, Stupid

[jschrod]

My, oh my. Yesterday I had mod points, now they're gone.

MOD THE PARENT UP! Informative!

implementing this project

[john_uy]

this type does not require good technical people but good public oriented people. erp projects fail not because the software cannot do the tasks but people using the system have problems with it.

for example, if you give a new software for people to use, they will tend to ignore, be against it - as a rule of thumb, people resist change. you must have a method of wooing them to use and own the system.

installation and customizations are the first part of the system, once the software has been installed, you will need after support services such as training and technical support.

installing a new software or system does not improve the process of doing things. it just computerizes it. the problem is, as per policy it requires a step 1-2-3-4-5 to do a task and you are designing the software to do that instead of improving the process and simplifying it to step 1-3-5, for example.

before starting with the system, you will really need to have people who are not all programmers or technical people. if you will be implementing an accounting system, then definitely you will need accountants to be able to implement the system - not relying on a programmer and stuffing them with accounting processes and terms.

for me, no matter how proprietary or open-source the software being used, it will still fair if crucial system implementation is not made from above. remember, it's not the software but the people.

Re:(A = B) does not imply (B = A)'Those who can't

[Anonymous Coward]

> (A = B) does not imply (B = A)

Logic wasn't your best course, was it?
If A = B, then B = A.

You probably mean that A => B doesn't mean that B => A [with => being the logical implication]

Is Peoplesoft the only non-open source option?

[wjcurry]

I'm currently a grad. student at Stanford, and they don't even begin to document the Peoplesoft bugs. People getting incorrect paychecks, all sorts of stuff. The rumor that I heard why they switched in the first place is that the admin/creator of the system wanted to retire, and no one else knew how to run the thing. It's too bad, because the old system was far superior.

Regarding other schools. I know that in Canada the University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, and the University of Western Ontario (all 20,000+ student schools) all went through hell when "upgrading" to PeopleSoft. Is there any alternative to their software that isn't open-source?

jcr's real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

jcr's problem has nothing to do with correct spelling or personal asssholery. It is all related to underdeveloped genitalia.

Re:jcr's real problem.

[jcr]

Nice try, but if you had anything to brag about in that area, you wouldn't be an AC.

-jcr

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

If their heads exploded, at least that would be something entertaining.

Silly Argument

[Anonymous Coward]

"The user is expected to change their business rules to adapt to the software rather than the other way around. It's arrogant and bass-ackwards. Software is supposed to malleable and adjustable. That's why it's called software. "

IN theory what you say is true.

But think of it another way; lets say you want a word processor, and you've looked at MS Word, Wordperfect, a couple open source solutions, and everyone of them would force you to change the way you work.

You're suggesting that its the fault of the software because it isn't infinitely maleable?

Perhaps you're right. But you're going to pay a dear price for that flexibility.

So think of it this way: Do your word processing like everybody else and pay $0-$400. Or hire someone to write you a word process at a cost of several $thousand to several $million?

Same way with these packages. You either completely customize the pacakge (and pay 4-10 times as much as the base software) or you alter your business.

If you alter your business, you get the bonus that your business starts to use best accounting practices.

So you choose.

Re:Silly Argument

[vsprintf]

So think of it this way: Do your word processing like everybody else and pay $0-$400. Or hire someone to write you a word process at a cost of several $thousand to several $million?

I don't know why I bother responding to someone who is afraid to put their name on their opinion. You have obviously never been involved with one of these ERP rollouts. What happens when you find out the timesheet package can't handle the contract numbers that you are required by law to keep track of? I could recite similar problems, but your analogy is just plain bogus.

Re:Silly Argument

[Anonymous Coward]

And you apparently have no idea about how career terminating a remark can be if placed on these pages the wrong way. Most of the folks who deliver ERP implementations (like me) know just how much visibility this stuff has in companies; we don't need more publicity than we already have. I can live the current level of yelling and screaming just fine, thank you. As well, this kind of open failure is not good for Stanford, the ISV's, or even "/." because it will once again make some think such large IT investments have dubious value at best. Finally, anyone in the business may actually work for an organization connected in some way to the project; so it would also be inappropriate for many of us to sign openly.

As to the original point: "changing Oracle Financials to accommodate the way Stanford redistributes overhead costs across its grants" is the kind of thing that absolutely is essential to the bigger picture here. Yes, the devil is in the details - like your timesheet example, or this key "Funds Management" issue (something relevant to just about anyone who has ever put in an ERP for a Public Sector entity like Stanford - you might think Stanford is a "private university", but where's a lot of the funds to be managed coming from??). This does not however mean Oracle and PeopleSoft were the wrong answer - I would first pick on Stanford Project Management as well as the Implementation Partners (if any).

The major culprits appear to be the usual suspects:

1. Going with a very long timeline - known to be for ERP rollouts (9-to-15 months per phase, max).

2. Making heavy mods to the delivered code - known to be tough to upgrade, especially for Oracle. As well, putting in code changes to someone else's code is tough to do in general.

3. Trying to get the software to do something it may not be capable of doing (related to #2, but I am talking about building new code to provide missing functionality here, not changing what was delivered) - building on new capabilities as customer development is a license for implementers and/or contractors to print money.

4. Not fully exploring the relationship between the software package, their business needs, and the implementation process - Many implementers and /or software vendors will tell you "YES we can do that" to win the business. But some capabilities - like Time Entry, Planning and Budgeting, or Funds Management - may mean different things to the vendors than to the customers. Proper planning & scoping might have found this out.

5. Not identifying early on where adoption of the EPR's "best practice" will be the better answer, and planning for this - Organizational Change Management has been mentioned earlier in this thread, but many organizations tend to hide from realities on this (i.e., underfunding the Org Change effort, or acting like such business change is not even needed).

6. Not realizing the impact of an ERP - The name says it all: "Enterprise Resource Planning" packages. In my experience many organizations - especially Public Sector ones - are challenged to find the happy medium between org politics and effective implementation, especially where everyone has to compromise on their specific demands to get an enterprise-wide application up and running.

Not sure which if any of these apply - because I have not done any work for Stanford. But many of the problems with ERP implementations tend to be some combination of the above 6 items, in my experience. The fact is, we are still learning how to use software at such a massive scale (I have some customers now with 10K, 20,K or even 50K users for some aspects). Rather than saying "the ERP is at fault at Stanford", we should be looking for a broader answer.

Why? Because none of this changes the basics - AIN'T **NOBODY** OUT THERE BUILDING BRAND NEW CUSTOM GENERAL LEDGERS - if they have any sense at all. To draw the analogy from the prior entry, that would be like building a new spreadsheet for only your company's

Re:Silly Argument

[vsprintf]

And you apparently have no idea about how career terminating a remark can be if placed on these pages the wrong way. Most of the folks who deliver ERP implementations (like me) know just how much visibility this stuff has in companies; we don't need more publicity than we already have.

Thanks for validating my point.

Re:Silly Argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless your mama named you "vsprintf", you're in no position to carp about other people not posting under a name.

Re:Silly Argument

[vsprintf]

I've been around here for awhile, and this is not my first nick'. I found that I was inhibited saying certain things about management while my real name was attached to the account. However, I make all posts using this account, and my comment history is public information. I could put in some fake personal info, but that is not my style. Anyone else can do the same, and then people know they are having a discussion with one person and not six different people using the same name. And, of course, ACs have no concern about content or moderation.

You generally see the same nicks here much of the time, and you know if they're trolls or idiots or worth reading. If not, their comment history is available and is more important than their, possibly, real name. In over 1200 comments, I think I've been modded troll twice - both times on comments critical of Microsoft. What's your comment history, Coward? Why isn't it good enough that you post with a +1 bonus? Are you afraid to put a nick' where your mouth is and face the moderation accounting? I'm concerned with your Slashdot user name and creds, not your real name, which concerns me not at all.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

You because a teacher.

What a terrible way to categorize professors

[Anonymous Coward]

"that's right, invisible fairies"

Not all professors are gay and many of them show up to teach their class. So this kind of slander is really uncalled for.

projectmanagement

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO this is a prime example why projects fail.
- ppl buy standard software only to discover they cant use it (a centralised software for a decentral system)
- making big jumps dont work (unless you are lucky)
- big institution have big inertia; changes take a long time, several big projects broke because they tought they could change the administration in no time
- sending good money after bad money.
nobody had the stamina to cancel the project. obviously it was in trouble early but nobody said 'stop' to (atleast !) reevalute the project

what can we say about that ? learn from history or
you will be dammed to repeat it over and over again.
(read the chaos report and you will find the same
points, read DeMarco, Brooks .. )

stanford has a lot of man/brain-power. why shouldnt they (profs & students) do it ? because they can fail ?

Harvard did the same thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The system can't even store *vacation days*...

Re:I don't know...

[Gilmoure]

Their heads would asplode?

SSDD (been there don that)

[gone.fishing]

I work for a large company (Fortune 500 level). A few years ago we moved from a mainframe environment to Oracle Financials and a few additional prgorams that were supposed to make everything better. It was a nightmare that cost the company millions and almost created financial disaster. The story is so similar, they customized the software for us and the customizations broke when a required upgrade was performed.

To this day there are things that should be easy that aren't but at least it works. Sort of anyhow.

After the project was over we learned that other companies had similar experiences. Another company that was similar to our main buisness unit had elected to go with almost exactly the same setup as us. They too were driven to the brink of ruin.

My feeling to this day is that we would have been better off staying with the mainframe system or going to something that emulated what we had been doing. It was the bells and whistles that broke it all for us and that other company.

How bad was it? Well the inventory didn't work right and we were unable to deliver product to our distributors even though we physically had it in stock. Since what we produce is perishable we had to throw away product we counldn't sell so we lost twice over.

One Question

[Pan T. Hose]

The nuclear power plant I used to work for had spent $5,000,000 building custom software for itself with Powersoft tools. It worked beautifully. The administration types thought that it cost too much and fired their programmers with the bone headed attitude, "we are an electric company not a software company." Now they are putting in a fifteen million dollar commercial package. I'm not there anymore, but I'm sure it's going to be a dissaster.

Dear God! Could you please tell us where exactly is that pawer plant in question located? Thanks...

Paradigm change symptom

[server_wench]

Perhaps this is a good time to consider the evolution of the university system in Western civilization.

In the middle ages, organized religions needed literate people to preserve scripture. As trade developed, universities needed to produce people who could keep accounts, interpret laws, and communicate in a variety of languages. With the industrial revolution, training in the sciences and engineering became important to produce technological inventions and infrastructure.

More recently there has been another major paradigm change -- that universities need to operate as businesses.

Thus, at least in everyday operations, universities now seek to follow in technology rather than lead. To keep enrollment (income) up, some promise vocational training rather than traditional learning. The goal is to produce consumers of existing technology for the benefit of major corporations. That Stanford administrators, along with those of many other well-respected institutions, chose the course of imitating what they perceived as accepted business practices is just another symptom of this change.

That the faculty IT experts whose knowledge was ignored or actually scorned chose to stay and continue to teach is a compliment to their dedication.

I hope that university administrators stop trying to be pale imitations of business organizations and that society wakes up to the fact that we need to subsidize education to encourage able and independent thinkers.

clarification.

[twitter]

Could you please tell us where exactly is that pawer plant in question located? Thanks..

The company has lots of plants, but the dissaster I refer to is an economic one and not a safety issue. The program was administrative not operations. Poor maintenance and records keeping will force them to shut down more often, and operators may be harmed but there is no public safety risk associated with it. The engineers will remember and have paper records when the databases don't work right. Also, Operations still has 1970 era analog devices to monitor the actual condition and state of the plant. When things break, they can turn it off if it does not shut down on it's own. It's going to cost lots of money and the cost will be passed onto the public but there's not going to be accidents.

Re:I don't know...

[Mr. Piddle]

and yes, I do work for a university.

So do I (slaps stamp on latest loan payment).

Peoplesoft's history in education

[Anonymous Coward]

The first major implementor of Peoplesoft was the University of Utah, followed by Michigan. Michigan posted huge overruns in time and money. Utah posted huge overruns in time, but tried to hide the cost overruns by sucking development resources from around the campus without attributing those costs to the Peoplesoft project. It caused some resentment at the hospital, for instance, that a significant amount of their resources were diverted without any budgetary compensation.

The glitches were memorable: The first semester of use at Utah, Peoplesoft scheduled an engineering class in the swimming pool "classroom."

To be fair, these things were to be expected no matter what software was chosen to replace all the disparate systems throughout the university.

But maybe that's the point. Enormously expensive proprietary solutions cannot be expected to pull things off better than free and open software.

To date, dozens of universities have contributed bug fixes and feature enhancements to Peoplesoft. Each pays Peoplesoft $100,000s each year so that Peoplesoft will let them have the contributions of the others. If even 20 of these institutions formed an OSS coalition that was similarly funded... the results would be staggering.

Peoplesoft works much like OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people don't realize how similar the Peoplesoft model is to OSS.

When Peoplesoft first ventured into the world of academia, they simply took existing PS modules for other industries and tried to make them work at a few pilot universities. Those universities bulked up on in-house and consulting developers. They spent huge budgets to adapt the Peoplesoft code to their worlds. Peoplesoft collected those changes and rolled them into the next upgrade, charging the original contributors to get the "official" patch.

In the end, Peoplesoft customers do much of the programming and contribute it back to Peoplesoft. Peoplesoft acts as the coordinator. The biggest difference is that contributors have to pay huge licenses to get access to the original code. Then they have to pay huge support fees to get their own code handed back to them with a Peoplesoft copyright.

Other than those two small things, there's not much difference in the two models.

Your comments are right on target

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

Here the CS and Math departments have their own networks. I have no idea about ECE (Elec. & Comp. Eng.) except that the engineering departments are a strong source of campus worms, viri (sp?), spam, etc. The IT office is a joke; the IT head hates linux (although the VP who oversees IT is warming to linux).
Just as an aside, do you remember who was the Provost at Stanford from 1993-99? The same person who has done such a good job of protecting us from terrorists. The quality of her work speaks for itself.

Re: Knuth'Those who can't do teach'

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

Just imagine if he had a real CS PhD instead of a Math PhD ... or not.
Seriously, TeX is great (as is LaTeX). I happen to think Knuth can do anything. (OK, he needs to work on the "walking on water" bit.)

I hope so... But are you sure?

[Pan T. Hose]

The nuclear power plant I used to work for [...] fired their programmers with the bone headed attitude, "we are an electric company not a software company." [...] I'm not there anymore, but I'm sure it's going to be a dissaster.

Dear God! Could you please tell us where exactly is that power plant in question located? Thanks...

The company has lots of plants, but the dissaster I refer to is an economic one and not a safety issue. [...] operators may be harmed but there is no public safety risk associated with it. [...] When things break, they can turn it off if it does not shut down on it's own. It's going to cost lots of money and the cost will be passed onto the public but there's not going to be accidents.

I can honestly say that I hope you are right. Still, I find it very suspicious, to say the very least, that you don't want to disclose the plant location. Very suspicious.

Um, Paul?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you know about the UK now?

You're DEAD.

The only "detailed post-mortem" that's going to be going on will be done by forensic analysts IF THEY EVER FIND YOUR HEAD.

Chew on that - oh, wait! You can't! You're dead!