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Stanford Learns a Software Lesson

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the school-of-hard-knocks dept.

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 :)'."

45 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. or not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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.

    1. Re:or not by tachin · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. Re:or not by Samari711 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    3. Re:or not by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    4. Re:or not by Facekhan · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

    5. Re:or not by Tony-A · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:or not by Apreche · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      --
      The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
    7. Re:or not by vsprintf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Conflict of interest by capt.Hij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Conflict of interest by REBloomfield · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.....

  3. Okay.... by Dachannien · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Those who can't do, teach"

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

    1. Re:Okay.... by REBloomfield · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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....

  4. Collective Hallucination by philntc · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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.

  5. "Those who cant..." by The+Only+Druid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"
    1. Re:"Those who cant..." by jfengel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  6. 'Those who can't do teach' by jeffy124 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle by johnthorensen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:this isn't the only PeopleSoft debacle by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Informative


      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.

      --
      AccountKiller
  8. There something to be said... by DeepDarkSky · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. 'Those who can't do teach :)'." by Baldrson · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Seastead this.
  10. You know what they say... by BrianGa · · Score: 4, Funny

    'Those who can't do teach'

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

  11. They should make their own open-source software by Anonymous+Writer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:They should make their own open-source software by KillerCow · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  12. I don't know... by TamMan2000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...
  13. Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS by nathansu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS by pooh666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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..

    2. Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS by fermion · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  14. Bah - they might be better off by MammaMia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  15. Those who can't do, teach by bob65 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    1. Re:Those who can't do, teach by quizteamer · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      Live Long and Prosper
  16. I proposed this to Clarkson University by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  17. Re: Knuth 'Those who can't do teach' by e9th · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  18. Or.. by MrPerfekt · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    I just wasted your mod points! HA!
  19. Academics don't do admin work by baomike · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

  20. Another example of the core problem by Chief+Crazy+Chicken · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  21. Not just Stanford... by Celvin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
  22. Shocking by twitter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "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.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  23. It's the Staff, Stupid by jonbrewer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  24. we want to believe by fermion · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  25. ERP? Extracting Real Payola by Ronald+Dumsfeld · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  26. Typical for ERP projects by costas · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.
  27. That's too bad. by twitter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  28. You can't automate a process that isn't defined by dwkunkel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  29. 1) buy software, 2) make it work by More+Trouble · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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

  30. Very similar to Cambridge Uni in the UK by Paul+Johnson · · Score: 3, Informative
    For a detailed post-mortem of a similar project with Oracle Financials in Cambridge University in the UK, see this report.

    Paul.

    --
    You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.