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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 :)'."
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
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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.
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.