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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.
"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.
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.
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
I mean, after all, it's not like John McCarthy wrote the Oracle financials package.
Seastead this.
'Those who can't do teach'
And those who can't teach, teach gym.
While those who can't teach gym, teach college.
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.
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.
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
Yup. If he could start with something as mundane as typesetting and come up with TeX, just imagine what he could do with ERP :)
Those that can't make the news, submit the news!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
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!
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?
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
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.