
How much does a university payroll system cost? $30 million, apparently. - yummyfajitas
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-uwsystempayroll,0,2597575.story
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edw519
"He also said the subcontractor, Accenture, was playing a limited role and was
well-qualified for the work."

And I'm well-qualified for doing brain surgery.

Like most enterprise debacles, this is NOT a technology problem. It's a
management problem. Or lack thereof.

(Honestly fellow hackers, is there anything _easier_ than payroll? That's what
we used to give the new guys.)

~~~
nradov
You think payroll is a large enterprise is easy? Not a chance. They are
dealing with multiple union contracts, salaried employees with various scales
and benefits, students, etc. The legacy application is probably full of
undocumented special cases that are necessary to get correct results, and have
to be tediously reverse engineered.

For another example, see the (in)famous C3 project.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System)

That said, I'm sure you're correct that there was some serious management
failures on this project.

~~~
edw519
"You think payroll is a large enterprise is easy?"

Compared to any other enterprise app, absolutely! The easiest, by far.

"They are dealing with multiple union contracts, salaried employees with
various scales and benefits, students, etc"

Oh, you mean you have to do math? It's not like they're launching a rocket. Oh
wait, that doesn't cost $30M either. Sorry.

"...have to be tediously reverse engineered..."

Or "tediously" analyzed and defined. Either way, it's what we do. Digital
blocking and tackling. Relatively easy; that is, unless you don't know what
you're doing and got the gig because your senior partner threatened the
trustees by withholding audit approval.

We hackers don't profess to be experts at accounting. Why do accountants
insist on being experts at building software?

~~~
seldo
To be fair, Accenture don't profess to be experts at accounting either:
they're generalist consultants.

Interestingly, Accenture (then Anderson, DeLany & Co.) apparently built the
first computerized payroll system in the US, back in 1953:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#History>

~~~
menloparkbum
Actually, they do profess to be experts at building accounting systems.
Accenture was spun out of an accounting firm and as you mention they've been
building accounting systems since 1953. Building payroll and other accounting
systems is one of the main things they do.

~~~
moe
So if they're doing it for 56 years then why don't they already have a modular
offering where they can just mix & match the modules as required, akin to SAP?

I know the answer(s) ofcourse, but couldn't resist asking...

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wallflower
To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, another school dealing with
the same legacy issues:

"The inadequacy of these systems is resulting in operational inefficiencies
that impact people at every level of this institution. It is difficult for
faculty and staff to perform even the most basic functions, such as hiring,
purchasing, tracking and managing multiple budgets, and making accurate budget
projections.

The systems lack basic tools and functionality to help staff do their work,
such as controls to prevent over-spending, visibility into pending financial
transactions, or ability to do financial reporting at the unit or department
level. The systems do not collect the level and detail of data required to
meet the UW’s growing information needs.

As a result, staff must engage in “daily heroics” just to keep business
operations running and get the information they need to do their jobs. They
must make extraordinary efforts to perform basic job duties, employing
numerous manual workarounds and engaging in other cumbersome and time-
consuming processes that take away from higher-level work.

To compensate for missing functionality, departments and units across the
University have created hundreds of shadow systems at considerable cost and
effort. These shadow systems represent a significant security risk to the
University, and maintaining them is costly and inefficient."

[http://www.washington.edu/provost/oim/roadmap/report/replace...](http://www.washington.edu/provost/oim/roadmap/report/replace.html)

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spoondan
There's no justifying the cost for this project. However, UW has 27
institutions and a central office that this software is supposed to cover.
Dealing with all of the campuses is an astonishingly difficult task.
University systems in general are not simple hierarchical structures, and
state university systems even less so. The challenges of working within that
kind of environment are very different than the challenges of dealing with
most businesses. Not that $12 million for planning is justified (especially
not after a failed $28 million project), but this project isn't quite as cut-
and-dry as you might expect.

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Dilpil
Interesting, they note that the university has 60,000 employees. I'll leave
the jaw dropping math to you.

~~~
seldo
Why make people do math? It's $500 per employee assuming the $30m figure in
the headline (which doesn't actually appear in the article). They spent $28m
on another system they never used, and are about to spend $12m on the second
attempt, making it $40m in total, or $666 per employee.

Either way, holy cow.

~~~
mkeblx
And the $12m is just for the initial planning stage, no actual implementation,
so the final cost will be much higher. But you get to amortize it over ~35
years.

~~~
Dilpil
Or if your accountants are clever enough, amortize it over 200.

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dryicerx
At first I thought it was an outrageous cost for a payroll system, but
according to the article, the UW system has 60,000 employees over 27 campuses.
For those 60k employees, getting paid is a _VERY IMPORTANT_ deal... there
can't be any mistakes in this scale. (A single tiny mistake will propegate it
self 60000 times and that won't be fun to fix).

Plus their last system lasted ~35 years (since 1975), so I am guessing their
planning a equally long lasting system.

~~~
seldo
That seems a really charitable guess, given the levels of incompetence that
seem to surround every other aspect of this project.

------
mrduncan
I'm curious where the OP got the $30 million from, it sounds like it's a lot
more than that unless some of these numbers overlap (it's tough to tell).

 _A first attempt to replace it with Lawson Software was scrapped in 2006
after years of work and a cost of $28.4 million._

 _The system's top budget official, Tom Anderes, told the Board of Regents
this month that planning for the project alone is now expected to cost $12
million._

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makecheck
An I.T. solution for this shouldn't cost more than it would for human beings
to walk around with a checkbook and a pencil.

------
invisible
So basically 400k of this is actually consumed by employees at the university
working on the project (if that), while the other 11.6 million is for paying
off good friends of the board that just so happen to have roles in the
consulting companies that provide services.

------
seldo
I can't help but think there's a big market for new, low-cost, web-based
software in old, boring markets that are ignored, like accounting, payroll and
CRM.

I'm not saying payroll is easy, but the guys who are building payroll systems
aren't facing a lot of competition, because the field is so dull.

~~~
mrtron
Those systems already exist.

The problem is the people in charge of acquiring the system go with someone
like Accenture because it is low risk for them, and people associate spending
more money with a better product.

