Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system IT teams at Europe's largest local authority are being given less than two months to get their disastrous Oracle system fit to provide finance reports and close down accounts. The Oracle Fusion system underlies Birmingham City Council's inability to file its accounts for the 2022/2023 financial year. Speaking to councillors …
They're not alone.
Regardless of how they've been using it, it should be possible to get financial reports for the use that was made. My concern would be that in similar circumstances there's often a lot of pressure on staff to demonstrate the project is, if not entirely successful, making progress and to feed data, even erroneous or incomplete data, into the system as an excuse for ticking off a milestone. A deadline from the auditors should hopefully at least force a confirmation of whether reliable data actually exists.
Yes, but that's the point. The audit can't begin until there are (output) figures to audit. The audit process then checks whether the output corresponds to the input and whether the input corresponds to reality. If it's not possible to positively confirm the available data is reliable - or has any basis in documented fact - that's a fail.
I worked in a sales department where the figures available from the database were "inconsistent" with the numbers that were required. The data actually existed, but the "format" needed adjusting to fit the invented truth. Is it +5% this month, or more?
Some other clients of Oracle fusion also can't.
There are several reason for this, but performance and artificial limitations to preserve some resemblance of performance are behind that.
This means you might be a budget holder that doesn't know your budget situation and can't access needed reports about income and expenses.
We don't write software to fit any particular purpose. We rewrite people to fit the software.
Why not get rid of those pesky humans? Eliminate the people and write software to fit the software. That is automation as intended by our software overlord.
And use some AI. That software can wear soft where soft wears software.
Only after they'd been given a raspberry though.
It amazes me how frequently these migration programmes fail -- as if they're viewed as purely tech exercises with zero business continuity planning.
Larry has near death experience /or slips on the deck of one of his yachts and knocks his head.
Refunds all the fees and for good measure adds a couple of billion on top to get Birmingham out of the mire it is in.
After that, he sets out to liquidate all his worldly goods and donate the proceeds to good causes - free health care etc
Split the bits either side of Cooper Bridge from each other. Historically they had very little to do with each other and it's very unlikely councillors from Dewsbury would know much about Huddersfield & vice versa. I'm not even sure councillors from Huddersfield know much about the valleys.
The monstrosity is actually named after a place that's not in it.
Splitting local authorities to that level would cause its own problems. Kirklees is quite a small area so it ought to be possible to make it work. Do agree that the name is pretty daft though.
North Yorkshire now has the opposite in that it's geographically far too big for a unitary authority; a county council with district councils, as it had until recently, actually worked reasonably well. But of course local government areas are one of those things where the government and its agencies can't leave alone! The new unitary authority is already not working particularly well. Issues in (for example) Whitby are completley different from those in Settle, over a hundred miles away.
I don't think many people in Kirklees think it works. It was a cobbling together of areas which previously had their own administrations with the West Riding County Council on top of them. The name was presumably the consequence of there being no name within the combined area which wouldn't identify it with one of the original areas to the detriment of the other. It's not a bit of accidental daftness - it reflects the underlying lack of logic.
I suppose the destabilising factor was breaking up the WRCC to create the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire. That, of course, is the root of your Whitby/Settle issue - Settle was also part of the West Riding.
Now, for goodness sake, we've also got a West Yorkshire mayor to no obvious purpose.
@Wolfetone
How would you suggest splitting Birmingham up?
I'm assuming you live local.
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/9810/new_wards_map_2018
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/download/2295/ward_factsheet
(For those who do not know Birmingham, see icon in terms of the likely fallout).
I think, realistically, do it NEWS. North Birmingham, East Birmingham, West Birmingham & South. Obviously it can't be straight down the middle, it'd have to straddle ward boundaries.
Or we could just surrender wards to neighbouring councils. I'm sure Solihull would love to add Tyseley to West Soihull like they do with North Solihull's Chelmsley Wood.
But the council wearing the fact it's Europe's largest council isn't a good thing! It's too big to serve residents properly.
So four new contracts for Oracle?
And new contracts for employees with four different employers?
Sounds lovely. For consultants. Perhaps best left until the current situation is remedied or at least fully known?
"It's too big to serve residents properly."
Remember the present issues are H&R and IT related. Outrageous incompetence yes, but not automatically linked to failure to serve residents.
PS: I gather that Sheffield council may have similar H&R liabilities (BBC news)
Remember the present issues are H&R and IT related. Outrageous incompetence yes, but not automatically linked to failure to serve residents.
The present IT issues are almost certainly signs that the organisation is dysfunctional and the people at the coal face tell their managers things, which are progressively distorted going upwards. Higher management then specs a system to replace the existing system, which has literally zero relation to what is actually being done at the coal face and so completely fails to work in operation.
If you actually started a new organisation from a blank sheet of paper, you at least wouldn't have that problem.
"I'm sure Solihull would love to add Tyseley to West Soihull like they do with North Solihull's Chelmsley Wood."
I presume you're not a local if you think Conservative Solihull council would wlecome thirty plus thousand Labour voting Brummies? And as far as true Solihullites are concerned, "North Solihull" is a maze of grim social housing overlooking the M6 and mostly built by Birmingham that they'd rather not be associated with, and had forced upon them by a Labour government re-organisation of local government in 1974. When you drive through Chelmsley Wood (as North Solihull is properly named), it's a case of locking the doors, flooring the accelerator, and telling one of the kids to get in the rear gun turret, check the belt feeds, flick the safeties to "off" and follow the free-fire protocol.
I don't live locally, but I guess it would be along the same lines as how London and Manchester are split up.
As I'm not local, I don't have any proposals for the specific names and borders for the new councils, but they don't all need to be the same size, and the names will likely be based on neightborhood names and the towns that make up what is now Birmingham.
It is the largest lower-tier local authority in Europe, so it is probably too big. There is already the West Midlands Combined Authority which isn't much bigger than Birmingham, it would remain as the upper-tier local authority, but maybe it would be restructured to be more like Greater London or Greater Manchester.
(Well actually an ex pat Londoner).
Also an IT wonk with 35 years experience.
Take if from me, this ain't never gonna happen.
I strongly dislike using the word impossible as a synonym for "just too hard" but in this case, even with infinite resources, it couldn't be done.
You have no idea how shit Birmingham's IT is beneath all this.
Birmingham is the the largest lower-tier local authority. The largest lower-tier local authority in London is Croydon with a population of 390k.
The largest upper tier local authority in Europe is Île-de-France (Paris and surrounding region).
The largest sub-national division in Europe is England.
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When I was working in the fiscal officer's office in an Ohio county, the Human Services (Welfare) department decided to install Oracle to maintain its case files, financials, personnel records and what not. Several years later when I retired, the system still could not talk to our payroll or financial systems, which meant two things, First, none of that department's bills or people could get paid without our office creating a multitude of patch files. Usually every payday. Second, dozens of coders got their basic Oracle training at the county's expense and then went on to work for private industries plus our IT staff was guaranteed employment. And since the state had paid for the system, with federal money, the department was stuck with it.
Did Birmingham City Council’s disastrous Oracle migration contribute to its bankruptcy?
In response, Labour leader of the council John Cotton and deputy Sharon Thompson said: "The Council's political and administrative leadership accept the recommendations from the external auditor, which comprehensively set out the challenges facing the council. They also highlight the need for us to examine how we work more effectively and collaboratively to build a better Birmingham."
.
Nowadays, particularly since the Fin-de-Siecle, even apologisers and bearers of bad tidings cannot stop including mendacious self-gratulation and boosterism.
So, they went for the cheapest option did they? Haha. The option where they take an off the shelf system and then train their staff to bend to its will. It could have worked a charm, but they likely skimped on the training budget by a country mile.
I remember taking over an accounts role that had been abandoned by the manager (got drunk and walked) who for one reason or another, and I suspect cheapo chiselling from the directors, was tasked with implementing a totally new accounts package, that they hadn't the first clue how to use, let alone instal and initiate all the accounts/ledgers/etc. It was a fucking fiasco when I turned up and spent the first two weeks reading the manual to finally conclude they had set it up backwards. The P&L account was meant to be the first account you created, not the last. It was never ever going to churn out anything meaningful, and as it was software approved for auditable use, no way of reversing any of the balls ups. I did offer to smash the hard drives and start again from scratch. haha.
For a city that's supposed to be investing in people, they could do with taking a very long hard look at themselves and consider their staff are people too, and a few weeks/months of training to add more strings to their bow, would have been very worthwhile, and not just a tick-box worthy.
My knowledge of Oracle Fusion is pretty much zilch, but I am aware of other instances where this has failed. Has it ever worked anywhere?
I know when we put in an accounts system (25+ years ago) for an education provider, we forced all the processes to change to match the IT as we had little familiarity with the software and didn't know how to configure it to match our processes. We could afford the software but we refused to pay the fees for the consultants to change the system to match our processes, so used the opportunity to update the processes.
I have a feeling that we may have done the right thing for all the wrong reasons. Its the first and only time I've worked with that type of software so I could and probably am talking crap.
Public Sector procurement has something to answer for here too. LA's, Health Authorities etc are obliged to put contracts like these out to tender and the procurement system is weighted to be fair all bidders rather than to um, common sense. Most IT departments will have a very good idea of the inherent risk to their data in moving to a new supplier, or what is likely to happen if several partners are involved as in this case, but the procurement process always seems to downplay this. All bids are taken at face value even though in the real world those of us working in the sector will have a very good idea of whose bid is credible in the real world, and whose is not. Previous recent failure in very similar contracts never seems to exclude anyone from bidding again...!
Oh gosh yes, how true this is. I recall one occasion where the in house techies started thinking about how we were going to recover from an inevitable ballsed up implementation when the contract was awarded and the only bidder we had any confidence in failed to win.
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