"Five years and 500 million dollars. That's what it took the California Public Employees Retirement System to finally launch its new computer system 'my|CalPERS'.... In what planet is $500 million a reasonable amount of money for a pension fund to pay for a one-off computer system? ... [A different path] would see CalPERS use the money it spent on a software package to instead build a business that offers the same capabilities to other pension funds and thereby create a feature set that no one of the pension funds could have afforded to develop on their own. It might be risky, but so long as the lead pension fund client gets the data management facilities it needs at the end, does it matter?"

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