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].
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.
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.
The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.
Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.
They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.
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.