This is a very useful breakdown of the costs of an enterprise software deployment at WUSTL, in the student paper—more...
This is a very useful breakdown of the costs of an enterprise software deployment at WUSTL, in the student paper—more than a quarter-billion dollars of spend over seven years. "
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"There are reasons for everything, and it's a big school—but it's always good to ask: (1) just how many services could be provided to students for that cost; (2) why there weren't more efficiencies given that Workday has obviously solved this problem before—that's the whole point of software; and (3) how vulnerable orgs that have this cost structure will be if code is not a moat and software costs go down 90 to 99%, which seems to be (seems!) happening."
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"I can understand why that college embarked on that journey a decade ago—there are thousands of projects like this everywhere. But I would throw out that anyone considering signing these contracts for the future should hit the brakes very hard right now and look at how the world of software development is changing. "
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"2026 is going to be a wild year as software problems that were previously thought to be exhausting and intractable without enterprise-level spend start to yield to LLM-assisted coding. It hasn't shaken out yet, and there's a ton of hype, but my guess is that the $265 million IT spends of the future...well, they may still happen, because there is something in a college administration that loves a fleecing, but they're going to take a different shape. And there are going to be options in the $26.5 million dollar range as well. Or the $2.65 million (but I think that's unlikely—orgs are complex.)
https://www.studlife.com/news/2025/12/10/breaking-down-workdays-265-million-cost