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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 :)'."
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
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.....
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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.
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?