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> the new system is too generic and insufficiently close to the original program I may have been unclear, but this was the scenario I was describing. The need

• skissane 4y ago
  They didn’t need a bug for bug reimplementation. Their problem was they tried to replace it with COTS software which wasn’t properly localised for their market. That’s more commonly a problem for smaller markets such as Australia, and also a bigger problem in highly regulated sectors such as education and health, where you are forced to deal with all sorts of government regulations which can be rather specific to the sector and jurisdiction you are operating in. The other problem, which is a more common problem with COTS software, is it is easy to be given one impression during the sales process, but then only once you’ve bought it and have started spending money to implement it that you realise how wrong that impression was. I think the people buying it on the customer side were senior university executives (who almost always come from an academic background) and they didn’t have a good enough appreciation for the nuts and bolts of student administration systems-and senior executives being sold on something where they don’t understand the details enough to see why it won’t work is yet another common cause for these kinds of projects to fail.