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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 :)'."
'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.
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...
"Those who can't do, teach"
Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.
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.
"Stumble before you crawl"
how dare you suggest that Don Knuth cant "do"
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.
I mean, after all, it's not like John McCarthy wrote the Oracle financials package.
Seastead this.
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.
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.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Those who can't do teach...
/., 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.
I've read some ignorant things on
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.
An even more accurate phrase is
Those that can do
Those that understand teach
Live Long and Prosper
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.
-- $G
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.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
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.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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 $5,000,000. Now they want 93,000,000 more?
The delay has been caused in part by Oracle itself, which helped Stanford customize the software so heavily?changing Oracle Financials to accommodate the way Stanford redistributes overhead costs across its grants, for instance?that together they broke continuity with future versions of the software, rendering portions of what they put in place unusable.
I can't imagine something so poorly modularized. What's going on here?
The university must cope with what Handley calls "version upgrade gridlock"?installing Oracle v. 11.5.9 requires changing PeopleSoft v. 7.6, upgrading to PeopleSoft v. 8 requires changing Oracle v. 11.5.9, and so on.
Oh, now I see they should have used free software from the get go and done it themselves.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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?
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.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
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.
Ah, Berkeley. Famous for ?SD.
make world, not war
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).
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.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Ten years for a glorified accounting and payroll system? That's just insane!
Someone mentioned the PHB problem. No doubt. PHBs don't understand the "make it work" step. I bought something, I'm done, right?