6 London boroughs haul all their kit to 1 Oracle biz product

Six London boroughs intend to generate £6m savings from a plan to implement the same version of Oracle's E-Business Suite. The boroughs - Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Lambeth, Lewisham, Havering and Croydon - will implement Oracle EBS Release 12 as part of a plan to support the introduction of HR, finance, payroll, pensions …

[Anonymous Coward]

Capgemini - Oracle accounts

So formally that would be 'Conlige suspectos semper habitos' . Round up the usual suspects and away we go for cost savings galore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle != savings

Nuff said really. Are they going to run it on SPARC kit? Much as I still prefer solaris (call me a pervert if you want) none of that will be cheaper in the long run

[Dr Trevor Marshall]

"negotiate a better price" WTF?

Anytime one has to negotiate with a monopoly, one is going to get burned...

[Anonymous Coward]

Made me chuckle.

Really? £6M, between 6 Boroughs, So £1M each. P-u-lease. Oracle and Cap will eat that in one change control.

[Mark 65]

Re: Made me chuckle.

My first thought when I read the headline was "savings until Oracle ups the fees". Then when I read this bit

"The councils have jointly appointed Capgemini to implement Oracle R12, which is a single system that manages HR, finance, payroll and procurement functions."

My thoughts moved straight to "oh dear". Strange how Government bodies of all levels seem destined to continue making the same mistakes over and over again - is there some school where they teach the career civil servants this?

[theblackhand]

What the reg really needs to offer is...

...a poll for public service IT failures.

Maybe two questions:

- a multiplier for how far out the original budget was

- the number of years before the project is such a mess that the Councils admit that while they implemented some of the new system, all key functions are still on the old system because they couldn't get those parts of the new system.

OK - maybe a third question with a scale for how cynical you are...

[Roger Kynaston]

Re: What the reg really needs to offer is...

Oddly, LG is less prone to high profile disasters than their Whitehall colleagues.

[Simon Brady]

What could possibly go wrong?

This worked a treat in Western Australia:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/262924,western-australia-to-scrap-shared-it-services-office.aspx