City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, is considering ditching Oracle as its main ERP and HR software after a disastrous implementation has left it unable to file auditable accounts, with the budget rising from £20 million ($25 million) to £131 million ($166 million). Speaking before the council's …
Consultants at £1000/day ? Par for the course. If you want to fail spectacularly, you need those kind of guys and, especially, you need to not listen to them.
It's all well and good to blame the consultants, but when you've ignored the red flags, you can only blame yourself for the shambles that ensues.
How long have the consultants been in? Are they not there to try and sort everything out?
The horrific project management and meddling by the council themselves is what's created this mess. I noticed the councillors are starting to lay blame at the door of recently employed staff leading this project, even though they are ones who cocked everything up.
High pay is essential for a successful consultation.
The people at the bottom of the pile usually have a good idea of what's wrong and what needs to be done. But those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing will disregard such information - it can't be worth much because it comes from someone on a much lower pay scale.
Successful consultants aren't blinkered by this attitude. They ask those in a position to know best and present it to management with a high price tag on it. Because it cost a lot it must be worth a lot.
The people at the bottom of the pile usually have a good idea of what's wrong and what needs to be done. But those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing will disregard such information - it can't be worth much because it comes from someone on a much lower pay scale. Successful consultants aren't blinkered by this attitude. They ask those in a position to know best and present it to management with a high price tag on it. Because it cost a lot it must be worth a lot.
That should be engraved in tablets of stone, and placed above the doorways of every large organisation. Sadly it wouldn't change the Emperor's New Clothes thinking that imbues every boardroom.
Are they not there to try and sort everything out?
Consultants are there to have somebody to blame. As the rats desert the sinking ship, more consultants are brought in to fill the spaces, until all those with original responsibility have escaped.
I remember government paying £800~1000 pday for the senior/principle grades of technical consultants pre 2010, which equates to circa £1500 today.
> you need to not listen to them.
You need to listen and understand…
I was thrown off several projects for speaking what people (especially customer sponsor) didn’t want to hear, only to be vindicated a few months later when the project got cancelled; a few even made IT press headlines… Thankfully, having previously briefed my managers and got their buy in to the problem and the proposed solution, these didn’t greatly impact my career.
I remember government paying £800~1000 pday for the senior/principle grades of technical consultants pre 2010, which equates to circa £1500 today.
Ah! That explains it!!
The customer thought they were paying for principled consultants but the supplier actually supplied principal consultants instead. So no wonder the council was screwed. All that is left for the inquiry team to determine now is whos who's whose what person's fault it was.
> The customer thought they were paying for principled consultants but the supplier actually supplied principal consultants instead. So no wonder the council was screwed.
Back in the days when Managers had secretaries to do their typing, our dubious IT Manager advertised for a "Principle Secretary".
We minions were much amused by this, arguing that it would be a Good Thing, since demonstrably he had no principles of his own.
"I was thrown off several projects for speaking what people (especially customer sponsor) didn’t want to hear,"
I've made a career out of saying what people don't want to hear, and repeatedly been shown the door as a result. My career guidance to the young is "As soon as your realise what's going on, don't shout the emperor has no clothes, just say what fine cloth he wears, and quickly find yourself another job".
Consulting: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem (Despair, Inc)
about Oracle and projects that end in disaster and budgets that are out of control.
How about NOT reporting the failures but only tell us about those that come in on time and on budget?
Probably going to be a paucity of news. Much like getting Trump (or just about any GOP politician) to tell the truth about anything.
Here is just one fact check of No 45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzQptsGUo3c&pp=ygUQbXNuYmMgZmFjdCBjaGVjaw%3D%3D
I'm sure it would, if paid. It's not Oracle's job to fix for free the screwups caused by a council that kept changing requirements, didn't listen to warnings, and ignored their consultants.
If you crash your car by ignoring traffic laws, would you expect Ford/Honda/etc. to get you out of trouble for free?
To be fair, the council were sold a product that was supposed to be fit for purpose. It turns out that despite the product being supposed to be designed for this kind of application, it does not even support the legally-mandated functionality. So yes, the council are on the hook for messing about, but really, they were sold a pup to begin with.
Oracle should be banned from selling so much as a box of paperclips in the UK for the next decade.
Birmingham should go back to using pen and paper to do this.
Services are being withdrawn from people thanks to this farce. Those responsible should be sacked, fined, imprisoned or all of the above.
Competency exams should be passed by anyone before they can take up an appointed or elected post in local government.
@ Tron
"Services are being withdrawn from people thanks to this farce."
Actually it is the other farce that is mainly responsible for the cuts to services and the rise in council tax, and the enforced fire sale of assets. Not that this farce is funny mind you.
Birmingham is not the only local authority that is grappling with the pay equality legacy. Lots of questions about that.
Icon: our future
"Birmingham is not the only local authority that is grappling with the pay equality legacy. Lots of questions about that."
Indeed. The article refers to £760m, but that's current liabilities - they've already paid about £1.1bn. There's roughly 370k properties billed for council tax, so the cost of equal pay settlements per property is £5k. Quite remarkable how the council managed to create a problem that big, and there's no transparency on what the build up of that cost is.
Competency exams should be passed by anyone before they can take up an appointed or elected post in local government.
Passing exams demonstrates competency only in passing exams, so your proposal doesn't fill me with confidence. Indeed, most of the consultants getting rich on the fly-blown corpse of Birmingham City Council will have got jobs with top notch consultancies precisely because they are good at exams.
Based on my experience on both sides of the fence having to work with (and select/engage) consultants and then in the private sector in consultancy I find the entire thing stinks.
Companies providing consultant just use the customer as a cash cow to generate money. Very occasionally you will have someone who understands more than recalling a playbook from memory and copy scripts of a stick but it is rare.
What is worse is when you engage a consultant and then get sent someone from a telephone book whose only interest is the fee they are being paid. As a consultant or part of a professional services team you can earn significant sums, it is very nice but I struggled with the ethics and went to earning slightly less but actually enjoying what I was doing and being good at it, solving genuine problems for customers.
Competency exams should be passed by anyone before they can take up an appointed or elected post in any form of government.
Being an MP in the UK is one of the few jobs for which you need no qualifications or experience. Even toilet cleaners have go on a training course. Toilet cleaners have my full respect. Even the ones that start at the bottom, so to speak.
for the UK government to commission a local authority managements system that it would release as open source ? An up-front cost that would save billions later on. Call it LAsoft.
I am aware that not all local authorities have the same requirements but the core ones must be similar. It could also influence legislation: ie Parliament not enacting laws until LAsoft was able to support it.
I know that the failed unified NHS system casts a long shadow here, but maybe those mistakes could be learned. Part of it is making local authorities have common working procedures unless there was good reason not to - eg Urban/rural requirements.
A home grown approach would also stop us bleeding money to large overseas corporations and would build expertise in the UK.
Timescale ? 5 - 10 years maybe.
Contract out to... ICL? Sorry, Fujitsu.
The idea of having a preferred supplier for HM's DP Systems is not inherently bad, particularly if they genuinely have proper staff training schemes etc. (i.e. like Marconi had when they were the preferred supplier for certain types of telephone system).
But it needs politicians with some minimal level of cluefulness to get it to work.
But it needs politicians with some minimal level of cluefulness to get it to work.
Hmm. They don't even seem to have a clue on how to trip each other up. Children, fucking children.
The problem is that you, me and other like-minded citizens need to raise the political kudos in getting this sorted. The expertise is there, untapped. The advice is there, unheeded. Because it won't happen within the lifetime of a single government, our party-politicians are just not interested. What's in it for them?
I'm sure there are honest, forward-thinking politicians, who would sponsor this but because they don't toe-the-party-line they are side-lined. We need to encourage them.
"PFI (a Labour idea, remember) was about spending huge sums on splashy, vote-winning projects, whilst loading the costs on future people who were not currently voters. The private-sector money-trough was the only way of getting the daft idea off the ground."
Bollocks, sir, bollocks. The idea of PFI was from the John Major government, launched in 1992. Admittedly the overwhelming majority of PFI deals were signed in the Blair/Brown Labour years, but the idea, that was pure Conservative party thinking.
Labour and Conservative are a uniparty. They pretend to be different, and sow division and discontent, but what they actually do is the same, the core policies never alter.
“ The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) began life in November 1992”, New Labour were first elected in 1997…
It was structured so that the benefits went to the private sector and the costs remained in the public sector aka taxpayers….
This was obvious from the several IT related PFI bids I was involved in. For PFI to deliver the same service as the public sector the prices needed to e circa 30% higher. So to be cheaper either significant efficiency improvements etc. were necessary, or level the playing field by simply bar the public sector from bidding…
Interesting series of articles here, focused on the NHS experience of PFI.
https://lowdownnhs.info/analysis/the-history-of-privatisation-part-4-the-early-days-of-pfi/
Birmingham is a Lower Tier Local Authority, so some local government functions are performed by the Upper Tier Local Authority - West Midlands Combined Authority.
As an aside, Birmingham isn't the largest local authority in Europe, it isn't even the largest in Birmingham, but it is the largest Lower Tier Local Authority. Île de France (Paris region) is the largest Upper Tier Local Authority in Europe.
The split of duties between lower tier and upper tier local authorities is different in different parts of the country, and some places have unitary authorities that do everything. But surely you could have modules for each of the functions a local authority has to do, and each one could install the modules that are relevant to their duties. The only unique thing about Birmingham is that it is responsible for policing loan sharks in the whole of England, so they would need to develop their own module for that.
All councils are legally required to do subsets of the exact same set of things.
Some of them don't do as many things and share responsibilities with another council, and some have chosen to do less of one thing and more of another, but the things are the same as they are defined in law!
Councillors are the ones who think they're somehow special and different to the next council over.
"Councillors are the ones who think they're somehow special and different to the next council over."
Some, certainly. However, I was speaking earlier to a colleague who is a member of a council that serves a population of over quarter a million people. Life's dealt her a shitty stick, she doesn't complain. She's everyday, unassuming, and interested in doing the best she can for the ward that elected her. I'm humbled by some of the things she's done to support others.
I'd agree there's some complete c**ts in local government, but please remember there's a lot of people doing their honest best on your behalf.
"for the UK government to commission a local authority managements system that it would release as open source ? An up-front cost that would save billions later on. Call it LAsoft."
Lost cause, I think! About the only thing that could be guaranteed is that is would be a massive, hugely expensive fuck-up, and would probably be abandoned after billions had been spent. Governent bodies seem utterly incapable of properly specifying big IT projects so that they actually work.
Governent bodies seem utterly incapable of properly specifying big IT projects so that they actually work.
Or to put it another way, the IT industry seems utterly incapable of properly delivering big public-sector IT projects so that they actually work. The kneejerk response of blaming the customer is a major part of the problem.
Isn't it both? The specification is often unrealistic / too vague and changes as it goes along, but the big IT consultancies are happy to go along with this rather than push back as they get paid massive amounts whatever.
Clear specifications and tighter contracts would encourage both sides to try harder. This sort of situation rarely happens when big businesses are procuring IT systems, does it? You don't regularly see stories of new stock management and POS systems in big retailers being a failure, for example - such occurrences are very rare, whereas in government circles it's pretty much routine. Government seems incapable of negotiating contracts where if the desired system isn't delivered and working then the contractor doesn't get paid.
A better approach than attempting a universal scratch-build would be to look round and find the best performing councils at each tier, take the top five and review their systems, pick a design that's clearly proven to work, appears to be portable and then duplicate that - systems and processes. Matters not whether it is Oracle, SAP or anybody else, the point is that the duties of councils are near enough identical, use a proven system as a blueprint.
The only problem is of course identifying what counts as best performing. The Office for Local Government are trying to do this, but they're a new organisation and the data being published isn't sufficiently clear - it can tell you if (eg) your council's relative performance in say council tax collection rates, but doesn't appear to properly split the different tiers responsibilities, and doesn't include things you might think important like resident satisfaction scores, frequency of missed bin collections, trading standards outputs, streetlight outages, roads conditions, response times to reported faults, plus unit and total operating costs etc. There are some consultancies offering local authority benchmarking, eg Impower, but they have a relatively small data set and don't seem to keep this up to date.
All local authorities need to be benchmarked properly, but at the moment that's not done. So they all fuddle around, with no clue who is best in class, only a limited idea of how they compare (because Oflog aren't collecting all the right numbers), and therefore it's difficult for councillors or officers to know what they should aim for.
Take Trading Standards for example; Peterborough has to deal with all the safety recalls for Whirlpool UK Appliances Limited, because they are based in the city; so when measuring output, you have to consider that they necessarily have to do a lot more output than for example Fenland next door.
"Take Trading Standards for example; Peterborough has to deal with all the safety recalls for Whirlpool UK Appliances Limited, because they are based in the city; so when measuring output, you have to consider that they necessarily have to do a lot more output than for example Fenland next door."
Doesn't work like that. Peterborough are the "Primary Authority" for Whirlpool. Peterborough Council TS provide advice that's nationally applicable, and the costs are settled centrally. The Primary Authority scheme is little known, but a huge achievement for reducing the cost and complexity of regulation. Unfortunately, successful initiatives like PA are ignored in preference to tales of woe, failure and disaster.
all schools and colleges in the UK have expensive, cra*, customised, bought in (and pay forever) management systems.
err no. Not ALL schools and Colleges are beholden to Crapita ESS PupilPay for their MIS. A small, but growing, number are actually jumping ship to rather more modern, forward looking suppliers.
Modern and forward looking does not automatically mean better.
At the school my wife works at one almost working system has been replaced with a smaller "modern" system that is far worse and less usable than the monstrosity it replaced. The simple task of tte register requires 5 mouse clicks and two page loads per pupil.
Heck, even Excel would be better. They still have to had a printed sheet anyway for evacuations.
Modern and forward looking does not automatically mean better.
Indeed not, however it would be hard to find a worse system than the one most of them use at the moment. Byzantine doesn't begin to describe it. It wasn't ever designed as a product and is largely a bunch of disparate systems kludged together. At least a more modern system shouldn't be that.
The simple task of tte register requires 5 mouse clicks and two page loads per pupil.
I hesitate to name names but would that system rhyme with last farts?
I've seen comment in the past that Oracle tends to pitch its products directly to prospective customers' board members, cutting out the specialists who really know what's going on.
Has anybody looked carefully at the procurement process in the case of Birmingham?
I don't mean whether the tendering process was done by the book, I mean who started pushing the idea that relying on Oracle was a fundamentally sound bet?
Philip Macpherson, a recently appointed Oracle program lead for the Council, said: "We are looking at doing some options analysis to genuinely weigh up the pros and cons around that to sort of underpin the case for reimplementation [of Oracle] and spec out the outcomes the council's after."
I think this goes a long way to explaining the problem. Firstly, it's prime example of muddled thinking -- combining choice of a specific product at the same time as specifying intended outcomes. Secondly, it exhibits a (probably unconscious) prejudicial bias in seeking to underpin a specific product choice. Thirdly, it's incoherent and ('sort of') vague. Fourthly, didn't they do sufficient options analysis before starting the programme?
What's needed to get these programmes implemented cost effectively is a coherent process of evaluation, design and implementation consisting of a sequence of stages with defined outcomes that can be verified as accomplished successfully before proceeding to the next stage. But of course everything is now 'agile', which (contrary to the manifesto) typically just means jumping to conclusions and launching into implementation without sufficient planning or risk assessment. Delivery is quicker, but commonly the wrong thing gets delivered.
Maybe we need a team/department from central government that deals with the tendering process for all council IT systems over £1m. One that can come in, identify problems with the tender process and bids and ensure that the taxpayer is getting value for money...
It seems at the moment, there are 100+ councils and government departments - before you get to the NHS Trusts and other organizations - and all of them are repeating the same mistakes every time.
Central government? Gawd!
My experience isn't at whole-council level, it's in elector roll and GP patient databases, and in these areas suppliers coordinated with their customer base to develop their systems and - *crucially* - the customer base changed their processes to converge on a smaller core of functions. Some big councils need to have their arse kicked and be forced to modernise and consolidate processes to reduce the amount of one-off custom spec modifications.
Yes, I hate "computer says no", but in some instances yes, computer says no, *you* change. Eg, we don't print three copies of letters, post one, and file the other two. The "filed" letters are just simply left inside the computer system.
Agile has an awful lot to answer for:
Deliver lots of stuff really fast.
Test a bit of and hope other stuff works
Actual product is a bug riddled mess
Next sprint fixes some of the bugs, adds new features (nobody wants), breaks more stuff that was not broken and adds more weird behaviour.
Rinse and repeat......
Developers and PMs are happy because they are delivering (loads) stuff. Nobody cares that what is delivered is a load of shite, fingers in ears ignoring all the feedback from users.
They ended up on Oracle, that's all you need to know.
You only end up on Oracle when you have absolutely no sense, control or idea of what you're actually doing, what that requires, and what the best way to implement it would be.
My concern would be why is this some sort of bespoke project rather than just what everyone else uses for the bog-standard business practices (ERP, HR and bank reconciliation? Gosh, if only there were other places who needed those!).
I am of the opinion that government projects should come with a fixed deadline less than 5 years, a fixed budget, six-monthly audits on progress, and the project terminated if it doesn't mean two of those audit's expectation. And all projects should have that requirement. You want to bid for government projects? You better get on board.
If you can't do something in 5 years, or you slip for more than a year, you shouldn't be doing it.
This place actually seems to have a decent handle on things, for a local government project. "This isn't working, we want to know when it will work, how much it will cost, or we'll cancel it" should be the norm.
100% someone with shiny shoes came in from Oracle and delivered a presentation with pretty pictures to the smooth-brained senior management team. Anyone with an ounce of sense would've seen the word 'Oracle' and noped out of there.
Public Sector needs to learn to fail fast, but they need to be free of the shackles of politics to achieve this - and why would they risk their career by telling an elected official 'no' ?
Maybe bankruptcy will be accelerated when their VMware renewal comes through from Broadcom? ;)
A very very fixed budget, that if something is supposed to balloon to over five times the original estimate, heads would roll.
But, alas, this is less about a functional IT system than it is about brown paper envelopes and scamming the system one is supposed to be overseeing.
"scamming the system one is supposed to be overseeing"
That's dark, even for a conspiracy theorist like me. But it's one way to make sense of the boondoggle. When the project is £20M, there is not much slack. After it balloons to £131M, who is going to say where the odd £1M went? Just need to make sure the ptoject can't be audited. Oh wait.
"My concern would be why is this some sort of bespoke project rather than just what everyone else uses for the bog-standard business practices (ERP, HR and bank reconciliation?"
HR and payroll should be common with other businesses. Rented property management will have commercial packages available, even specialist social housing packages have been developed for housing associations. But managing electoral registers or bin collections isn't something that a regular business requirement.
"Gosh, if only there were other places who needed those!)."
There are. Other councils. That's why it makes sense to sponsor a modular local government administration system; modular because the various functions are distributed differently between different tiers in different parts of the country.
Off the top of my head there are three electoral roll managment products that a) all talk to each other, b) are robust, and c) came sround through highly tightly specified core functionality, discussion between suppliers and customers, and customers changing processes to make things work.
My local council has just been merged with five others, and part of that was merging six electoral rolls using (from memory) two different systems. First year: run the old systems while creating a naming scheme to uniquely identify each entry in six different sets; second year: run from the merged system while creating naming scheme for the unified dataset; third year: rename each entry to the new name scheme.
Included in that has been six local by-elections and one Parliamentary by-election, and everything can continued to run perfectly.
The Oracle fiasco seems to be a One Huge System problem.
I believe the original spec was to do a fairly vanilla installation with minimal customisation, and all departments would adjust their business practices to suit the new software. They'd apparently been using a highly customised SAP product before, but I think there are rules whereby you have to review and compare to the rest of the market occasionally - and evidently Oracle wowed the decision makers.
Of course, with big projects like this, Oracle don't directly get their hands dirty, but rely on third party "Implementation partners" to do the installation and configuration. Chances are they're more used to businesses rather than councils, who have a myriad of different budgets, income sources and expenditures; while of course each department would likely have vigorously protested at having to change their business practices, demanding something that works exactly like SAP. ICT presumably didn't have the authority to resist...
Added onto which, they apparently changed implementation partners part way through the project, which is very telling on itself...
There is no incentive for the consultants to finish this project in a timely fashion, they will bleed Birmingham City Council dry. Just like Oracle has done.
Anyone who has worked in public sector knows that consultants are normally the kiss of death for any project. If in-house staff can't implement and support a system, how on earth is it going to be viable in the long term?
Seems like a money spinner for consultants. Do a crap job and they will keep calling them in to 'fix it', infinite money glitch???
It strikes me that its not so much consultants being the problem, but more about who the consultants report to.
If the internal development team feel they need support or specific expertise the employing specialist consultants is sensible. If the consultants report above the development team or the project managment team level, then you have a problem.
"Philip Macpherson, a recently appointed Oracle program lead for the Council, said: "We are looking at doing some options analysis to genuinely weigh up the pros and cons around that to sort of underpin the case for reimplementation [of Oracle] and spec out the outcomes the council's after.""
Dear inmate, how would you like to run the asylum? Here, take the keys and here's the bank book.
Quite a lot of LED street lights have been installed around inner ring and in some residential areas. But still many of the older ones that are not sodium are still around (the orange/yellow sodium ones have mostly gone).
The LED street lights seem to have an array of actual high power LEDs so I imagine you could disconnect a third of them in each array?
(I suspect the sound bite was more along the lines of 'we are scouring the teacups for savings' than an actual policy)
With respect, you've got that 180 degrees out. An LED might not generally be dimmable, but LED luminaires generally are.
There are very, very few incandescent streetlamps, they are either LED or gas discharge lamps. Whilst some gas discharge lamps can be dimmed, the low pressure (deep orange ones) can't be, and the higher pressure ones depend on the control electronics (so assume mostly not). Most dimming applies to LEDs because the luminaires were generally designed with this in mind along with remote control that didn't exist for sodium vapour systems. Dimming typically occurs in specific time periods, eg midnight to 4am when expected traffic levels are lower.
It does make sense. Dimmable LEDs for streetlighting have been installed for years - and because the luminous efficiency of streetlight LEDs is no better than sodium vapour lamps, the energy savings are minimal unless the council uses dimming. Whether the locals want dim streetlights is another matter, but they've no say in the matter.
The real benefits of LED streetlights are better quality light when not dimmed, and they are hoped to last six times as long as gas discharge lamps, so big savings on the cost of bulb replacement. Initial observation around me suggests that the better life expectancy is already apparent, whether they last for the hoped for twenty odd years we'll find out in a decade and a half.
Lumens per watt for LED is actually lower than sodium, however because LED is white light rather than monochromatic orange light, you can get the same visibility with fewer lumens, and you can reduce electricity consumption by about 30% that way.
You've worked for a streetlighting PFI contractor? Thought not, but I have.
Luminous efficiency in the real world is about the same for the technologies used for street lighting. When considering the actual luminaires, potentially the sodium vapour lamps can be a lot better. Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.
You've worked for a streetlighting PFI contractor? Thought not, but I have....Luminous efficiency in the real world is about the same for the technologies used for street lighting. When considering the actual luminaires, potentially the sodium vapour lamps can be a lot better. Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.
That comes across as tetchy and condescending, and wasn't intended to be so. Soz.
And agree with me their taxpayer "My Brum" site is the best 2001 could offer ?
Wherever that money went, it wasn't on decent software. Although frankly there are tonnes of FOSS solutions that could have been used rather than spunking millions on a custom CMS "solution".
I used the Birmingham City Web site recently to report a missed bin collection and separately to check an aspect of my council tax registration. Both transactions went fine, auto-generated email confirmations, and the bins got taken.
The pages look like the standard gov.uk templates. They work well, and work on low spec devices, so perhaps not trendy design. Whatever is behind the Web pages seems to work ok. Not really an ERM function so won't be the actual Oracle at issue.
This screams out in the story, right?
"heavily customized version of Oracle for finance"
You can read that in a number of ways,
"Hacked on core functionality, can no longer upgrade"
"Didn't understand how to develop properly, so customized (hacked), now in world of hurt"
"Oracle was the wrong solution in the first place"
Either way, whenever you read a term like that, "customized", as opposed to "extended" or "framework", it sounds very much like a cluster f0rk.
That City Councils keep buying software from these drug-peddlers is just inexcusable. It all boils down to incompetence and corruption. Somewhere, someone is getting his pockets lined granting these companies these lucrative contracts.
The excuse is always that they're buying standardized software, but almost always they want modifications which make the solution 100% bespoke and prohibitively expensive.
It would be much better to fund some UK company to develop the software, keep the rights to the code and to open-source it, so other City Councils can use it too.
Oh really? Not from underpaying women for decades?
Those evil former employees, how dare they want to be paid the same as men for doing the same job.
More lefty lawyers causing shit for our noble oppressed English Men!
The program lead has only been in the role 3 months and they're expecting him to have figured out the mess they're in, all the options of getting them out of the **** of their own creation and figured out a detailed plan - presumably after years of getting themselves in this mess.
I notice the councillor concerned has his own IT consultancy company - although it doesn't appear to be active (https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/04667591) and doesn't have a working website (http://rapidcomputing.co.uk).
A heavily customised ERP...
*sigh*
Every time. Instead of changing process to match as much out of the box capability (any tier 1 ERP will work with a large enterprise) they customise it to poor processes.
Makes the implementor and consultants money but not value for money or sometimes achievable.
Worked on a few and dealt with some consultants. I remember being in one session and mentioned that one was good - but was he "£xxxx/day" good. When they are paid that much, they can take the rap on the government select committee. Central and Local government never learns.
Councils have no idea how to eploy people in professional roles, you either manage people or you're a minion nothing else exists.
Which means if you are competent professional project manager etc you will inevitably leave for better pay and the council will lose these skills.
Which means councils have to go to consultancy to get those skills back in and will regularly end up hiring the people that left to be paid more and paying them 3x what they were as employees.
And council managment still have no better idea how to use those consultants skills and generally will engage in petty squabbling, territorial disputes and arguments over the quality of biscuits availble at project meetings.
I have and do consult for councils (whom I used to work for but left to get paid 80% more to do the same job with less responsibility) and it's very rarely the consultants that hold up projects, it's council's internal bickering and inability to make decisions or stick to decisions, or follow their own governance that drag things aout and causes failures.
In terms of "Labour know this", Thurrock was Conservative controlled and went bust, Woking went bust under Liberal control, but specifically on the back of failed private sector investments by the previous Conservative administration.
Incompetence is universal in British party politics.
I think it has reached the point that the Tories have pissed off so many people (including many of their core supporters) that they'll be out at the next election.
As is frequently the case in what is effectively a two-party system, the one which has been out of power for a while eventually gets re-elected because the incumbents have proved so awful, and enough people in the marginals vote for what they consider to be potebtially the least worst option.
Will Labour be as bad as the Tories? Who can say, but both of them are offering slight variations on the globalist, corporatist agenda so chances are they won't actually be much different at all.
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