51–60 of 106 posts
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster. Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from. It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
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Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/ Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying: > Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just li…
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…
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?
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
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…
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.
I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?
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…
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
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.
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software. Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
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.
“Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.
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I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger. 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. So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root…
> 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 upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.
My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
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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.
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 mea…
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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.
> The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?