Comment by supriyo-biswas
Comment by supriyo-biswas 2 days ago
This is absolutely right - the education space is absolutely stingy and will balk at far lesser amounts; so the $600M seems difficult to believe.
Comment by supriyo-biswas 2 days ago
This is absolutely right - the education space is absolutely stingy and will balk at far lesser amounts; so the $600M seems difficult to believe.
Not quite true, especially not for the higher end research universities.
The University of Washington is projected to spend $2B on modernizing IT infrastructure (which does seem like a reasonable amount).
In that number though is $340M to update it's accounting system. Not quite directly comparable to $600M for HR, but not completely perpendicular either
A lot more institutions, but in terms of total number of students, about 4x the UW system, ~2x amount of administrative staff, 4x the academic staff.
Not saying the UW got a good deal of course, it's pretty clear based on the progress of the modernization that UW didn't.
Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs.
Edit:
I did some digging into the Tender [0] and it looks like it was $300M total across all 25 universities and colleges in the CUNY system along with the CUNY administrative portion itself and it was a full bundle of HRM, ERP, On-Prem Compute Resources, and headcount (PS and internal) over a 10 year period, so $30M per year across all 26 institutions.
This came out to around $1.25M ACV per organization (10 year contract, 26 organizations).
In reality, some of the larger colleges (eg. CCNY) will have spent much more than the smaller ones (eg. Bronx CC).
In addition, each of the large CUNY colleges had budgets in the $150M range in the early 2010s [1] along with a separate $2B budget for CUNY's central organization (as mentioned above)
What seems to have happened is the above page treated overall TCV as part of a single budget, when in reality, each individual constituent org with it's own budget spent out of their own pocket for ERP, HRM, Headcounr (PS and internal), and Compute (on-prem)
This isn't egregious for the size of organizations that each of the constituent colleges and CCs in CUNY are.
The big question is, if you used the PSC's (imo flawed) methodology, what would it give for CSUs, UCs, and SUNY (all of whom have a similar structure and student size). I'd expect a similar amount.
[0] - https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/...
[1] - https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload...
On top of that, digging into their manifesto in the page above, I found this startling and horrifying stance the PSC has
> CUNYFirst will be part of the arsenal by which CUNY Central shoves Pathways down our throat
Basically, the CUNY PSC is opposed to a unified core curriculum, allowing students at all CUNY institutions to transfer between each other.
This is something that is diametrically opposed to student well-being.
Basically, the PSC at the time opposed NYC community college students from taking courses at CUNY's 4 year universities and vice versa, and was strongly opposed to interoperability and transfer of credits.
California's equivalent system (ASSIST) has had a massive benefit in allowing Californian community college students to transfer to CSUs, UCs, and private schools like USC and Stanford.
CUNY's faculty union (PSC) on the other hand is completely opposed to a similar system being adopted.
The whole point CUNY PSC was opposed to the CUNYFirst system was basically because the PSC was completely opposed to allows simplified inter-college transfer.
I've seen this happen before with big companies - they don't have $100k to pay for software which would save them $5M / year.
Why? They'd signed a contract with SAP who'd sucked up their entire budget.