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.

Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.

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.

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.

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+.

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).

People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.

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.

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.

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?