1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.

A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.

Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat

2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos

This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.

3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper

1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares.

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.

It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.

I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:

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+.

> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

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).

Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse.

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.