No...it did not start off with just a contractor wondering when they were getting billed. When practitioners were not being paid that is when a whole lot of scuttle-butt was stirred. The conversion WAS blamed and the MV system was most often the target even though they continued to use it (and may still) to perform the processing of claims. This has been documented in the press. Funny the legacy system was a system widely used by other companies within the same market without such problems. The Oracle people did not talk to the MV people and vice-versa. The Oracle people had no clue about an MV system and for the most part vice versa. This of course makes it difficult to replicate an existing legacy system. The conversion to Oracle was orchestrated by those who did not fully understand BOTH systems and how they functioned.
What should also be mentioned is that this undertaking by Oxford was a nightmare in Project Management in that there was a steady stream of consultants through their revolving doors on both the Oracle and MV side. Bringing in consultants for a duration of a short contract period, burning them out and quickly replacing them results in inconsistent code and a lack of vision of the complete project from beginning to implementation. This is also a prime example of when end-users let their ego take over and believe that they can produce a software product far better than what they are currently using. Software vendors generally have a broader vision of the market than an end-user and incorporate it into their product. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of KevinJ Jones Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 8:56 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [U2] Companies going belly up converting from PICK/MV Here we go again. The annual Oxford Health Plans Misconception. Let me start with a moment of heresy. The migration to Oracle did not cause the companies financial difficulties. This is the same company that long before it migrated to Oracle was not billing many of it's Freedom Plan customers. The only reason this was brought to light was one of the Pick contractors had bought a plan and after 3 months asked "hey, when do we get billed?" Oracle and a myriad of Oracle consultants said in writing that the database as designed would not work.(i.e no vendor file) Which of course leads to the visual of management sitting around in a room one day and someone says "I don't understand why this failed, we got rid of everyone who said it wouldn't work." That said the there was some real bizarre PICK code. I saw one program that updated a file one attribute at a time with 22 WRITEVU's in a row occurring after every row was entered instead if one write after all of the data was updated. I think what OXHP shows is that U2/PICK is a more forgiving data base. Whether that is bad or good is probably the real debate. The real problem at OXHP was to many people had at worst been promoted to their level of incompetence, or more likely one level to high for their experience. That said, they were the hardest working group of people that I have ever been with. I did not always agree with them, but they always showed up. >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5/16/2004 6:39:02 PM >>> I found several hits when googling Oxford-Health Oracle fiasco Is there a particularly good write-up on this story that anyone can recommend? I still thought I read about companies that ended up going under (perhaps VARs) when attempting to migrate from MV/PICK to SQL-based DBMS's. Thanks. --dawn Dawn M. Wolthuis Tincat Group, Inc. www.tincat-group.com Take and give some delight today. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-u2- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Allen Egerton > Sent: Sunday, May 16, 2004 4:45 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [U2] Companies going belly up converting from PICK/MV > > On Sun, 16 May 2004 09:05:37 -0500, you wrote: > > >I've tried to search the archives for some old postings and have been > >unsuccessful, so sorry for asking for previously posted info. > > > >I'm looking for information related to companies that moved or attempted > to > >move from applications based on MV to Oracle or other relational > databases > >and went belly up in the process. > > > >Thanks for any anecdotes or info you can pass along or point me to. -- > dawn > > Not belly up, but you can't leave Oxford Health Plans out. > > Anecdote: > Million dollar bonus for transferring data from Universe to Oracle > tables if done over the weekend. Not happening fast enough. "Drop > the constraints". Bonus received. Tables full of garbage. > > -- > Allen Egerton > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ------- > u2-users mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users
