Slashdot Mirror
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 :)'."
I found this article quite funny because my school, Boise State University, is having the exact same problem with Peoplesoft.
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".
"We are the first generation to influence the climate and the last generation to escape the consequences." - John McCain
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.
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.
I hate sigs.
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.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
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.
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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.
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
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....
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.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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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 $5,000,000 building custom software for itself with Powersoft tools. It worked beautifully. The administration types thought that it cost too much and fired their programmers with the bone headed attitude, "we are an electric company not a software company." Now they are putting in a fifteen million dollar commercial package. I'm not there anymore, but I'm sure it's going to be a dissaster. You have to wonder if they are going to fire their engineers and clerks because they are not an engineering firm or a filing company.
Just think of how much money everyone would have saved had they switched over to free software in the mid or late 90s.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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!
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:
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.
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.
Now they want 93,000,000 more?
Here's the really aggravating part: for $93M, I can put together a team of 100 (programmers, artists, technical writers, etc) dedicated to nothing but getting a fully functional, 100% customized to Stanford's business flow requirements, ERP system written and debugged in under a year. Each person would walk away with enough money to be very well off for quite a long time.
Whomever spent this much money with nothing to show should be dragged through the streets by rabid horses; and then bad things should happen to him.
Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.
You must have missed this in the article: Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999.
Granted, he's not an instructor now but he surely is responsible for fixing the mess and has been for five years:
Handley joined Stanford in November 1999 as executive director of administrative systems. Previously, he directed the national PeopleSoft Practice for Higher Education at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Before that he held positions at the University of Toronto, where he enjoyed a 14-year career as a psychology instructor before taking responsibility for university systems there.
No mention of a CS degree or any technical background, just an affiliation to PeopleSoft? Is this why Stanford has been screwed around by their vendors for so long?
The plot thickens, he's spoken at Open Source conferences! He should know better. I'd love to know what he said.
Anyone known anything else about Chris?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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".