S.F. schools abandon disastrous payroll system after spending $34M
sfchronicle.comI've been screaming this for years: there was never a rational reason not to buy off-the-shelf solutions. This problem is identical to those faced by thousands, even millions, of other organizations. The solution has been developed and refined for decades. Why should a single school district try to reinvent the wheel from scratch? There must have been bribes and kickbacks involved, as there is no other explanation for them choosing this path over utilizing existing solutions. It's astounding that people haven't been imprisoned for this yet.
> I've been screaming this for years: there was never a rational reason not to buy off-the-shelf solutions. This problem is identical to those faced by thousands, even millions, of other organizations. The solution has been developed and refined for decades. Why should a single school district try to reinvent the wheel from scratch?
The article does call it the "build-from-scratch EMPower program that never was able to adapt to the complicated needs of public education employees". But it goes on to say "The original contractor for the EMPower system was SAP, with Infosys responsible for implementation" – was it really "from-scratch" or was it just off-the-shelf SAP payroll?
What I suspect is the real story: public sector very often has complex and unique rules, which business systems (payroll included) designed for the private sector struggle to handle. In the private sector, there is a lot of flexibility to change the rules, so if you buy an off-the-shelf payroll system, you'll often choose to change your business practices to work with it, rather than try to customise it to handle your pre-existing business practices. But in the public sector, due to laws, regulations, unions and politics, that approach is very often impossible, so you have no choice but to make the system work for your unique needs – and it is unsurprising that such attempts often turn into expensive failures.
The article also says:
> The school board is expected to approve a new contract on March 12 with Frontline Education, which offers a system in wide use among California school districts
This is something else I've seen before – often mainstream vendors (such as SAP or Oracle) whose products work well for your average private sector business struggle with unique needs of public sector entities, but there are often smaller niche vendors which have specialised solutions pre-built to meet the unique needs of entities of that particular type (such as California school districts)–and even when customisations still turn out to be necessary, often have greater domain-specific expertise which makes it likely they'll get them implemented successfully and for a more reasonable price
The canadian federal government needed a new pay system and they bought "off the shelf" from IBM and it was a complete disaster and cost more than $2.4 BILLION. For payroll software
SF spent a ton of money to design their own trash can. NIH apparently goes well with NIMBY.
Hanlon's razor
How can a payroll system cost that much? Certainly it’s a solved problem since many other districts manage payroll just fine. Any reason this isn’t just corruption?
Incompetence and corruption.
If there is one thing that the SF government is competent at, it's corruption.
You are not alone.
The French military payroll system (codename Louvois) took 20 years of attempts to be finally abandonned. It costed about 150 millons euros every year since 2011 and the initial cost was estimated at 60 millions....
This is so embarrassing.
I wonder what this will do the stock of Infosys, and whether it will affect their reputation. And did they really develop it from scratch, or did they deploy an existing system, which then required custom work?
It was customized SAP software.
That partly explains why they experienced issues in the first place.
SAP works well if you change your business processes to meet SAP's expectations.
If you insist on instead changing SAP to match your business processes – that's how Lidl in Germany wasted €500 million – https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
The difference between Lidl and San Francisco Unified School District: Lidl is a private business, so they could have chosen to change their business to do things "the SAP way". SFUSD is a government entity subject to extensive rules and regulations which grant them far less freedom to do that.
Yeah, SAP's whole business is the standardisation of workflows across different businesses in the same work area.