Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

I guess I have three questions here.

1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.

2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?

3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.

It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?

Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.

I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.

Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.

It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.

Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.

Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" - https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.

Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff

With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.

I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.

Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.

The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)

Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.

HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].

[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...

[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/

[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/

I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.

- The UI is slow as hell.

- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.

- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.

Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.

workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.

it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.

this is a disgusting amount of money for this

so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M

proof we should be getting paid for assessments