Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Cost and scale of the Workday project

• Commenters are shocked by $266M over ~7 years, translating (by one rough calc) to ~$7,600 per staff member, or ~$2k/year per student, which many call “insane” and comparable to hiring armies of secretaries.
• Others argue ~$38M/year for HR/finance/CRM in a 20k+ employee / 16k student organization plus a major medical network is high but not obviously irrational, given complexity and risk.

Experiences with Workday and other enterprise tools

• Many describe Workday as slow, confusing, unreliable, and the “worst software” they’ve used; people keep data outside of it because it loses input.
• ServiceNow is also heavily criticized: bad navigation, broken back/forward, slow page loads, weird URL schemes, confusing UI.
• Some counter that implementations vary; misconfiguration and over‑customization by in‑house teams can make any such platform miserable. A few note that compared to older tools (mainframes, BMC Remedy, 3270 UIs) these systems were once a huge step up.

Why buy Workday instead of building in‑house?

• Defenders emphasize: international staff, visiting faculty, student information systems, multi‑role entities, integrations across many semi‑independent units, compliance (including HIPAA in the medical network), and long‑term support.
• They argue universities lack the capacity to build, maintain, secure, and evolve systems of this scope, and that previous “homegrown” systems often became brittle, underfunded legacy code only a few people understood.

Calls for university-built or collaborative systems

• Several ask why universities with strong CS departments don’t jointly build a modular open system for academia, noting past successes (e.g., older registration systems, classic university software).
• Others respond that governance, maintenance, politics, data access/privacy, and differing needs across institutions make this very hard; students and PhDs shouldn’t be diverted from research into running core admin IT.

Administration, incentives, and consultants

• Multiple comments blame administrative bloat, misaligned incentives, and a “consulting parasite” ecosystem (Workday/Palantir/ServiceNow/Accenture, etc.) that sells complexity, change requests, and overruns.
• Some suspect “kickbacks” or at least opaque vendor–leadership relationships; others see mostly underestimated complexity and organizational dysfunction rather than outright corruption.