Bill Crowell, CIO of Meredith Corp., the $1.1 billion publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, believes it is just this profit motivation that has caused many of the troubles he and other CIOs have had while implementing Oracle 11i. He had purchased Oracle 10.7SC, a client/server-based financial system that handled accounts payable, the general ledger and purchasing functions from the vendor in the spring of 1999, with the assumption that it would be good for at least four years. But in the fall of 2000, Oracle released a new Web-based version, Oracle 11i, and told its customers, including Crowell, that it would be dropping support for all previous releases. Crowell had no choice but to upgrade. (Under pressure from customers, Oracle has repeatedly rolled back the end-support date of these earlier versions. And recently, Oracle officials say they would not immediately be dropping support for older versions.)

Oracle also promised that 11i would include a feature that would automatically enter electronic records of all the purchases Meredith employees had made using their corporate credit cards into the accounts payable or general ledger system either monthly, weekly or daily depending on how the company configured it. Crowell says that when he purchased 11i, the promised functionality was absent. "It wasn’t until about a year later when 11i actually had that capability," he says. It was an inauspicious beginning.

As soon as he began the upgrade, Crowell found bugs running rampant in the software, like ants scuttling over a piece of fruit. Files were corrupted. Data was lost. Processes didn’t work. Screens froze. "It was just a nightmare," says Crowell. "We were getting literally dozens of developer patches to this software. Then we were getting patches for patches. The quality was just atrocious."

One of the biggest bugs bit the interfaces between application components in the financial system. The system didn’t transfer data between accounts payable and the general ledger, between purchasing and accounts payable and between purchasing and fixed assets, Crowell says. The failures were bad enough that had Crowell and his team not been running 11i in a test environment, Meredith would have had to shut down its financial system. It would not have been able to do its accounting or pay its bills until the problems were solved. (Oracle officials declined to comment on either the bugs in 11i or on Meredith’s specific problems with the software.)

"It was clear [Oracle] never tested the interfaces because they flat-out failed the first time. We felt that what was [supposed to be] their general release software was effectively beta," says Crowell. "There’s no question that they were under pressure from management to be first with a Web-enabled version of their software."