4 ms·

I would seriously love to read a detailed case study on this.

unixhero 5y ago
And another one on the US army's failed ERP project. https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-air-force-oracle-erp-failure/#:~:text=After%20spending%208%20years%20and,for%20a%20mere%20%2490%20million https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-ai....
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Air Force. The Army uses GFEBS (https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/general-fund-enterprise-business-systems-gfebs/ https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/general-fund-enterpr...), which wasn't exactly a walk in the park to transition to, but it was a success in the sense that the data migrations were basically completed 7 years ago, the project was not abandoned, and it is still used by the Army and expanding to additional users. Honestly, the biggest question here might be why do other branches of service all need their own custom ERPs? Why not just use the Army's?
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I assume it's public sector emergent behavior. I've seen large failure in France public offices too. There's near zero incentive (beside political posture) for things to be done well and neat.. so they don't.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Plenty of enterprise projects fail as well, they just don't get the publicity that public ones do.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I discussed that with someone on reddit. Indeed private sector can fail too, they share some of the reasons. People said it was also a function of size.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        Yes, the chance of success does seem inversely proportional to the size: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.438.6899&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.43...
        agumonkey 5y ago
        My limited observations on the non IT side of execution was an absolute lack of care about the actual goals. - Companies would just cash in the fat check, produce "something" close enough to spec and leave profit over value - Customer higher rank has no clue about anything but paid 500M for something, so it has to be good, and anything not working is blamed on employees being stupid. - Even though agile is overblown at times, big projects inability to react to issues on the ground was a daily cause of pain for everybody in the building. Stupid bugs, random crashes, absurd ergonomics.. (to the point that pen and paper felt like sci-fi level of performance, you could even make a logistical assessment of the innate nature of handwritten document speed vs bogus IT stack) ps: thanks for the link. If you know other papers, sites about this, shoot

And another one on the US army's failed ERP project. https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-air-force-oracle-erp-failure/#:~:text=After%20spending%208%20years%20and,for%20a%20mere%20%2490%20million https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-ai....

nonameiguess 5y ago
Air Force. The Army uses GFEBS (https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/general-fund-enterprise-business-systems-gfebs/ https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/general-fund-enterpr...), which wasn't exactly a walk in the park to transition to, but it was a success in the sense that the data migrations were basically completed 7 years ago, the project was not abandoned, and it is still used by the Army and expanding to additional users. Honestly, the biggest question here might be why do other branches of service all need their own custom ERPs? Why not just use the Army's?
agumonkey 5y ago
I assume it's public sector emergent behavior. I've seen large failure in France public offices too. There's near zero incentive (beside political posture) for things to be done well and neat.. so they don't.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Plenty of enterprise projects fail as well, they just don't get the publicity that public ones do.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I discussed that with someone on reddit. Indeed private sector can fail too, they share some of the reasons. People said it was also a function of size.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Yes, the chance of success does seem inversely proportional to the size: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.438.6899&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.43...
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        My limited observations on the non IT side of execution was an absolute lack of care about the actual goals. - Companies would just cash in the fat check, produce "something" close enough to spec and leave profit over value - Customer higher rank has no clue about anything but paid 500M for something, so it has to be good, and anything not working is blamed on employees being stupid. - Even though agile is overblown at times, big projects inability to react to issues on the ground was a daily cause of pain for everybody in the building. Stupid bugs, random crashes, absurd ergonomics.. (to the point that pen and paper felt like sci-fi level of performance, you could even make a logistical assessment of the innate nature of handwritten document speed vs bogus IT stack) ps: thanks for the link. If you know other papers, sites about this, shoot