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 :)'."

Comments

or not

[Anonymous Coward]

'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.

Re:or not

[tachin]

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

Re:or not

[kfg]

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

Conflict of interest

[capt.Hij]

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...

Collective Hallucination

[philntc]

"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.

"Those who cant..."

[The Only Druid]

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.

'Those who can't do teach'

[jeffy124]

how dare you suggest that Don Knuth cant "do"

They should make their own open-source software

[Anonymous Writer]

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.

Re:They should make their own open-source software

[KillerCow]

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.

Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[nathansu]

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.

Re:Let us not forget that WE LEARN FROM PROFESSORS

[fermion]

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.

Re:Those who can't do, teach

[quizteamer]

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

Another example of the core problem

[Chief Crazy Chicken]

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!

we want to believe

[fermion]

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.