The email went out. The PeopleSoft team was done. Roles eliminated, knowledge walked out the door, new cloud system on the way.
Then the federal compliance requirements showed up. The ones the new vendor had not accounted for.
So the state government did the only thing it could do.
It called the PeopleSoft team it had just laid off. And brought them back at contractor rates.
I shared that story on LinkedIn this week, along with two others. A healthcare org three years into an 18-month implementation, still running parallel with PeopleSoft because payroll will not cut over, $4.2M over budget. A higher ed shop that migrated Campus Solutions to a cloud system that “does everything,” except their financial aid configuration, so now they maintain custom code in two systems.
Three verticals. Three platforms. Same pattern.
The people who sold the project did not have to live with the outcome.
Why am I telling you this today?
Because on Tuesday, July 14, Oracle is hosting “Move to Cloud Day: Getting Started.”
Let me be clear about something. I am not anti-cloud. I am not anti-Oracle. I am an Oracle ACE. Fusion is the right answer for some organizations at some point in their journey.
Here is what I am against: pretending the decision is simple.
Think about what Oracle actually does with its time. It spends one day telling PeopleSoft customers how to start leaving. It spends the rest of the year shipping continuous improvements to the platform they are supposedly leaving. Support extended again, now through at least 2037. New update images across HCM, FSCM, and Campus Solutions. PeopleTools 8.62 delivering Landing Pages, Smart Prompts, WorkCenter 3.0, and PeopleTools 8.63 with AI infrastructure right around the corner.
Companies do not invest twelve more years of engineering into products they expect you to abandon.
So when the Move to Cloud Day invite lands in your CIO’s inbox, the honest framing is not “the future is calling.” It is “one option among several is holding a webinar.” Blah!
Paul Hartle, a senior PeopleSoft architect in our community, asked me a direct question under my post this week: what is the actual failure rate on these rip-and-replace projects?
The numbers are ugly. Depending on the study, the majority of large ERP transformations fail to meet their objectives, with commonly cited failure rates well above half.
Birmingham City Council’s Oracle Fusion implementation reportedly started near a £19M budget and has been projected to cost more than ten times that to fix.
The council issued effective bankruptcy notices along the way.
But Paul’s follow-up was the sharper insight:
the replace decision is almost always driven by budget optics and the word “legacy,” while evaluating what is already in place gets skipped entirely.
Another commenter, David Swartwood, an enterprise transformation and recovery leader, named the real cost better than any analyst report I have read:
Institutional knowledge debt.
The software is the easy part. The hard part is faithfully reproducing years of accumulated business rules, exceptions, integrations, controls, and undocumented tribal knowledge that quietly keep the business running.
His test for a successful migration: can the business operate on Monday morning without discovering everything that was never written down?
And Karah, a consultant who has worked both PeopleSoft and Workday, added the part nobody in a sales cycle mentions: she has talked to clients years after hypercare ended who are still struggling to make the new ERP do what the old one did.
The demos look clean. The implementation team is enthusiastic. Then they leave.
Your PeopleSoft environment did not survive 15 or 20 years by accident. It survived every audit, every regulation change, every “we’re migrating next year” conversation that never happened, because people like you built institutional knowledge into it one fix at a time.
That knowledge is the single most valuable asset in the entire migration conversation. And it lives in your head.
Which means you are valuable on every side of Tuesday’s question:
If your org stays on PeopleSoft, you are the person extending a mission-critical platform through 2037.
If your org evaluates moving away from PeopleSoft, you are the only person who can answer David’s question: what are we depending on today that we do not even realize exists?
If your org goes anyway, you are the person who makes sure Monday morning still works.
And if they skip that step, you have seen how the story ends:
Emergency re-engagement, at contractor rates.
The professionals who get hurt in migrations are not the ones on either side of the debate. They are the ones who were invisible when the decision got made.
The takeaway: before Tuesday, write down three things only you know about your environment that no document captures. Then make sure your leadership knows you know them.
That is not politics. That is positioning.
All jobs sourced from PeopleSoftCareer.com/jobs. New roles added daily.
Director of Enterprise Applications | PeopleSoft | HCM City of Boston · Full-time · Boston, MA · $109k-$147k
Senior PeopleSoft Technical Developer Hennepin County · Full-time · Remote (Minneapolis, MN) · $95k-$142k
Apply ->
PeopleSoft Integration Developer Bright Vision Technologies · Full-time · Remote (Irving, TX) · $100k-$150k
Apply ->
Senior PeopleSoft System Support Analyst, T&L and Payroll Harris County · Hybrid · Houston, TX
Apply ->
PeopleSoft Integrator Tri-Force Consulting Services · Hybrid · New York, NY
Apply ->
Specialist, Supply Chain Analyst (PeopleSoft) L3H · Fully Remote · Montgomery, AL
Apply ->
8. PeopleSoft Software Engineer III Salt Lake County Information Technology · Full-time · Salt Lake City, UT
Apply ->
Curated pick of the week: the City of Boston Director role. Public sector, HCM, leadership scope, posted salary. Exactly the kind of role where 15 years of institutional knowledge is the qualification, not the liability.
Over 100 PeopleSoft-specific AI prompts, interactive agents for PS workflows, playbooks, and security checklists. Documentation, SQL, and testing work that took hours now takes minutes.
The Hub is included with every paid PeopleSoftCareer Community membership. So are all paid Insider issues and posts. Starting at $19/month, one community membership covers everything: the full PeopleSoft AI Hub, every paid issue of this Insider Newsletter, and the full member community.
If your organization is having the cloud conversation, the Hub has the ammunition: AI tools, playbooks, and guides that support the PeopleSoft roadmap. It is all inside the community.
That’s all for this week.
Derek Tomei - Founder PeopleSoftCareer
Has your organization been pitched a rip and replace? What was missing from the business case?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.