Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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?
Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers. I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customization…
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
It’s engineering, not research
PhD in engineering is a thing
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#84Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#85Imagine spending that kind of money, and even if everything goes perfectly, your still stuck with fucking Workday at the end.
How much do they pay the football coach?
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#86I 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 - 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 s…
I suspect $260mm wouldn’t just solve all those problems for a single university, but for all
Universities across the nation, assuming the software is being written with an open ethos and to benefit all universities like suggested by the OP.
This reminds me of how a small team of U.S. seniors provided WiFi to basically the entire D1 football stadium for our college (at a time this hadn’t been done before), for Unrelated to this (but maybe still explaining why), the college president was suspected of having sent contracts to “friends” who had significantly overcharged the university for years.
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#87I 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…
The real answer is:
the kickbacks are too good.
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
Honestly I think most IT systems are net negative for most orgs. If you remove some db batch jobs like payroll it looks even worse.
Payroll, inventory ... what else? Student grades maybe. Contact info for studemts and employees. Essentially keeping a simple db schema.
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#89I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship. Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to cle…
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.
Re: Workday project at Washington University hits $266M
#90In context, WUSTL has a $13+ billion endowment and earned solid returns as last reported: https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/
So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)