1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.

A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.

Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat

2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos

This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.

3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper

It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.

> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).

1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares.

2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle.

3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.

I have some context here, as my dad used to work at a state college running "the systems". There was era of thin clients and a centralized VAX machine or similar that did all the work. I remember weekends where my dad had to work because they were "running the numbers" which involved calculating grades and producing end of semester reports and such. Somehow this took more than a day of processing for a few thousans students and ran on a big tape machine. Sometimes it would crash or something so someone had to be there to keep things moving.

I don't remember all the details, but this is what they used up til the mid-90s. By then, I could probably run something on my 486 home computer that would complete in half an hour. But there were decades of process and customization embedded in these systems.

When modernization happened, it was swift. My dad was lucky with the timing as he was retiring during the transition so even made bonus money coming back as a consultant. But you can imagine that even if the new software was pricey and not as customizable, the speed improvements and reduction in staff made sense.

Once the old staff was cleared out, there was no department of staff being paid to build computer services, only the lesser staff needed to maintain and use it. The issue was that hardware/Internet usage expanded too fast, the importance and reliance on tech grew and it became a selling point for unis to have the newest systems in place.

It makes sense now for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, as customization and cost are wildly out of balance with AI and the latent tech workforce available at every college.

I would say the blocker now is the same as what allowed creaky old systems to persist into the 90s - administration doesn't give a shit about any of this and it is only viewed as a cost center. Until differentiating through customization provides an obvious and immediate fiscal benefit to the admins themselves, most unis won't look at changing off their shitty landlord systems until they are basically forced to by the market.

I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:

1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.

2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)

Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.

3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.

For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.

Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse.

I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.

#1 has to be thought through carefully because ultimately this would involve students being able to access other students' information. It only takes one instance of stalking, harassment, etc. for it to blow up.

There exists a large well-paid army of tech sales ppl whose whole job is to make sure that can never happen.

The real answer is:

the kickbacks are too good.

My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows it, everyone knows how to use it.

> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though

Data Integration.

Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.

A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.

All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.

That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.

I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though.

That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?

infinite money glitch!

One of our local, private, and financially troubled universities has their department hierarchy on line. I was amazed, while recently looking to get in contact with a person about auditing a class, how many "head of XXXX" positions existed in the university directory. It seems way more complicated that it needs to be, and I can see how they would be in financial dire straits.

The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.

“Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.

What you describe is possibly the one thing that would be worse than implementing Workday.

You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.

You might want to share with the class?

Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?

I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.

Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.

Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.

As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying.

For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.

How much do they pay the football coach?

We call those "change requests"

So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.

I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.

I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)

They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...

I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.

Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.

Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.

What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.

We have something called ServiceNow where I work. It's so horrible that I assumed it was in house.

> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?

When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.

> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities

Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.

But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.

> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity

Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.

An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex.

Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.

This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.