21–30 of 106 posts
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
I guess I have three questions here. 1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university. 2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting the…
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount. HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2]. [0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st…
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount. HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2]. [0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st…
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary). People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
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.
I guess I have three questions here. 1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university. 2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting the…
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.
> Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments
Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again. It must be re…
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.