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 themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
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
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.
To quote the university's website:
> 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
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?
It’s engineering, not research
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+.
> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.
> 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).
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.
A LOT of major software was written in universities, plenty of the foundational technologies of the Internet included.
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.
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 empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
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...
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> 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 like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
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.
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 really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
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?
Workday’s student offering is designed as a full student management offering like Banner et al, with the carrot that it’s internally integrated into the financial & HR systems, which avoids another vendor and also a massive and ongoing finger pointing exercise.
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
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.
infinite money glitch!
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.
What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
What you describe is possibly the one thing that would be worse than implementing Workday.
Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" - https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.
Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff
I'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 clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.
- 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.
workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.
Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
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.
They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
You might want to share with the class?
it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.
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-lou...
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 where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
> 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.
Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.
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.
Spending $2k/year/student on it sounds pretty insane to me. At that price it would be cheaper just to hire an army of secretaries and do it on paper.
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 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.
$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.
this is a disgusting amount of money for this
so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M
proof we should be getting paid for assessments