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Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementa

Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementation" charges that didn't really deliver much value, were rarely on schedule or on budget. Oracle's enterprise calendaring program was totally inadequate and had UX that made most point-of-sale systems look effortless by contrast. Also, the assets managing app, Sunflower, was another dud. The only thing Oracle Database had going for it was no crippling license activation (license scofflaws are/were sued or fined into oblivion worse than M$FT), which one could say was equivalent to MS SQL. Unlike MS MSQL, Oracle DBMS has/had bazillions of support patches to apply to run a real production box, analogous to the previously separate Sun's Solaris patchsets. Btw: For smaller enterprisey shops, either MS SQL or Postgres are the way to go. Often multiple similar components are needed because different apps have firm requirements that only support one or another; but generally try to avoid this because supporting too many heterogenous components is expensive (laborious)... hence the prevalence of local "standards." Deploying everything with cfengine3 or puppet can help reduce the manualness and nudge vendors into repeatable, idempotent deployments rather than clicking on inane GUI installers like an animal. ProTip: Don't let consultants "provide" oversight / free-reign for their own projects, budgets, etc., that's like the wolf guarding the henhouse. The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). Or lots of money will be transferred from idiots to crooks (enterprise caveat emptor). Edit: fixed grammar

damcedami 11y ago
The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs. # My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés. The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people. In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.
    - konradb 11y ago
      Wow that's wildly aggressive. I know people say 'push for the sale' but that seems counterproductive. It seems like they would have got further if they listened more.
  - 11y ago
greggyb 11y ago
> The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). This so much. Especially the "know exactly what they need" side of things. I speak from the consultant side of the fence, and we've had a number of projects where project management was lacking on the client side; it ends poorly. We always have our own project manager on projects, and we strongly encourage the client to have their own as well. It really helps to maintain a clear escalation path, and makes everything run much more smoothly.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  Large enterprise account engagement is trickier, than say a solo consultant contract with a startup, because there are way more expectations to manage and moving parts to coordinate. As a client-facing consultant, you're often having to balance multiple masters of client and internal politics without having bleed-through and maintain a unified position regardless of other people's screw-ups, accidents or outright lies.
copsarebastards 11y ago
I worked for a large company which will remain unnamed, who a few years after purchasing a 12-year unlimited support contract, switched to using Postgres. Read: they were already locked in to paying for Oracle's most expensive contract for 12 years, regardless of what services they used. In short, they concluded that due to the cost of developing for Oracle, it was cheaper to migrate to Postgres than to continue using Oracle even when Oracle was free.
- engi_nerd 11y ago
  It is somewhat rare that companies will recognize the fallacy of sunk costs ("We've already spent so much, we need to do this"). I think the world would be a much different place if we could somehow overcome this cognitive error.
  - qnaal 11y ago
    makes for good examples that everyone can learn from
    - minusSeven 11y ago
      easier said than done.
  - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
    I see this repeated all the time and tend to label it "the investment-bias fallacy" but it's also called commitment bias. [0] Go into any casino where people are trying to win back their lost money is one classic cliché. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
    - engi_nerd 11y ago
      "Sunk cost fallacy" is what my college "Engineering methods" course called it, but we are talking about the same concept.
- 11y ago
jtreminio 11y ago
> to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD Was it really necessary to type it like that?
- DarkIye 11y ago
  For general sanity: $150,000,000
  - victorNicollet 11y ago
    To be pedantic, 1.5e8 carries additional information about accuracy: $150,000,000 ± $5,000,000. By contrast, 1.50e8 would be ten times as accurate, and so on. Of course, accuracy is hardly relevant here.
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      s/accuracy/precision Sorry, I don't usually try to be pedantic, but when the conversation is already about nitpicking, I think it's necessary. Significant figures are precision, not accuracy. Accuracy is "being in the ballpark". Precision is "tight groups".
      - victorNicollet 11y ago
        I'm sorry for the confusion. English is not my first language, and I resorted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision to pick between "accuracy" and "precision".
        mikeash 11y ago
        To put it another way: "pi is exactly 3" is extremely precise, but not very accurate.
        moron4hire 11y ago
        On the other hand, if you had said "Pi is 3", you would have been accurate, but not very precise. If you said "Pi is "Pi is 3.14", you would have been so precise that you could have gotten to the moon and back.

damcedami 11y ago

The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.

bmir-alum-007 11y ago
The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs. # My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés. The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)
- Spooky23 11y ago
  I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people. In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.
  - konradb 11y ago
    Wow that's wildly aggressive. I know people say 'push for the sale' but that seems counterproductive. It seems like they would have got further if they listened more.
- 11y ago

greggyb 11y ago

> The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). This so much. Especially the "know exactly what they need" side of things. I speak from the consultant side of the fence, and we've had a number of projects where project management was lacking on the client side; it ends poorly. We always have our own project manager on projects, and we strongly encourage the client to have their own as well. It really helps to maintain a clear escalation path, and makes everything run much more smoothly.

bmir-alum-007 11y ago
Large enterprise account engagement is trickier, than say a solo consultant contract with a startup, because there are way more expectations to manage and moving parts to coordinate. As a client-facing consultant, you're often having to balance multiple masters of client and internal politics without having bleed-through and maintain a unified position regardless of other people's screw-ups, accidents or outright lies.

copsarebastards 11y ago

I worked for a large company which will remain unnamed, who a few years after purchasing a 12-year unlimited support contract, switched to using Postgres. Read: they were already locked in to paying for Oracle's most expensive contract for 12 years, regardless of what services they used. In short, they concluded that due to the cost of developing for Oracle, it was cheaper to migrate to Postgres than to continue using Oracle even when Oracle was free.

engi_nerd 11y ago
It is somewhat rare that companies will recognize the fallacy of sunk costs ("We've already spent so much, we need to do this"). I think the world would be a much different place if we could somehow overcome this cognitive error.
- qnaal 11y ago
  makes for good examples that everyone can learn from
  - minusSeven 11y ago
    easier said than done.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  I see this repeated all the time and tend to label it "the investment-bias fallacy" but it's also called commitment bias. [0] Go into any casino where people are trying to win back their lost money is one classic cliché. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
  - engi_nerd 11y ago
    "Sunk cost fallacy" is what my college "Engineering methods" course called it, but we are talking about the same concept.
11y ago

jtreminio 11y ago

> to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD Was it really necessary to type it like that?

DarkIye 11y ago
For general sanity: $150,000,000
- victorNicollet 11y ago
  To be pedantic, 1.5e8 carries additional information about accuracy: $150,000,000 ± $5,000,000. By contrast, 1.50e8 would be ten times as accurate, and so on. Of course, accuracy is hardly relevant here.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    s/accuracy/precision Sorry, I don't usually try to be pedantic, but when the conversation is already about nitpicking, I think it's necessary. Significant figures are precision, not accuracy. Accuracy is "being in the ballpark". Precision is "tight groups".
    - victorNicollet 11y ago
      I'm sorry for the confusion. English is not my first language, and I resorted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision to pick between "accuracy" and "precision".
      - mikeash 11y ago
        To put it another way: "pi is exactly 3" is extremely precise, but not very accurate.
        moron4hire 11y ago
        On the other hand, if you had said "Pi is 3", you would have been accurate, but not very precise. If you said "Pi is "Pi is 3.14", you would have been so precise that you could have gotten to the moon and back.