Brit council fumbles Oracle Fusion launch, leaving SAP to die another day East Sussex County Council in England is conducting "a further health check of the system and programme" after it failed to go live with Oracle Fusion, its replacement for SAP R/3. A report to the Cabinet of the £538 million local authority said in March that the Managing Back Office Systems (MBOS) Programme set to replace …
Why does government have to reinvent the wheel in every parish, council, county, etc.
It's payroll. Why is there not a centralised government payroll for all government purposes. Especially when it reports to... government services (e.g. HMRC, state pensions, etc.).
Why is every place having to procure their own thing, from the commercial sector, make it interact and be compatible, and support and change it themselves?
There is only one answer - because it's the only way you can get backhanders.
The PO thing is a slightly different problem. What seems to be the issue is that It was over-claimed as the totally reliable, error free, safely sealed black-box evidence trail. In fact, it was- as was admitted late on- as buggy as any bit of major software etc. i.e. Horizon wasn't,as far as we can tell from the reporting, too bad. But a total no-no for the key, let alone the sole piece of evidence in prosecutions.
Oh no, Horizon was far, far worse than that.
It was a very simple database, with none of the features required for tracking money and sales transactions.
The core design was unusable, as it ignored nearly all the requirements of financial reporting.
Financial isn't a simple database. You cannot ever "roll back" a transaction that's happened, because the sale has in fact occurred.
Every governmental body starts up their very costly tender process, has their own very specific requirements etc. Then they all find out the vendor they chose overpromised, the very specific set of requirements was incomplete or incorrect, and they go years and hundreds of millions over budget.
They are all councils, they have the same tasks, goals, and hopefully a similar structure. Why reinvent the wheel?
I understand that policies and processes are rigid, but why are they so different from each other that a completely different tender process is required?
This is not just a UK problem, it occurs in pretty much every country and every type of (semi-)public sector.
Although what you say sounds reasonable, not every council do the same things in the same way.
This is largely historical going back to before councils started using computers. Each one was autonomous, and invented their own processes to do things, back in the day when everything was paper and ink. And this is not just payroll, it's everything councils do, from running their own meetings, generating and accounting for their income from rates, council tax and grants, and how they pay for things.
Yes, the overall effect should be the same. Services get run and paid for, council employees get paid, and the councils have to keep track for accountability reasons. But that is where the similarities stop.
Before councils computerised, their paper systems were different from each other. When computers came in, many councils wrote their own software (my first job was with a Borough Council as a software developer in the '80s) around their existing processes. And ever since then, they each have been continuing to run their own processes, needing their own customization for generic packages. It's not going to stop, ever.
That is until somebody such as Central Government decides to interfere and define one true way to do all of this. But that is unlikely to happen, because councils will push back against an authoritarian reduction in their perceived independence, especially if the systems are defined by a government of a different political leaning to the council.
I actually agree that it should be done, but I cannot see how it can happen.
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One of the problems is that there;s a mindset that "if it's expensive it must be better"
That and the Schmoozing that SAP/Oracle/MS/Goo all do has a corrosive effect. Even if XYZ outfit royally fucks up, they seldom find themselves on the "never do business with again" list and the supply contracts never have penalty clauses - something that will bounce back HARD on an overzealous salestwat
I agree that some is self inflicted now, I am not sure how well a council saying like "we are changing how long we give an empty property discount for because of the software" would go down.
Internal processes being different is one thing, but they can actually have different public facing policies and charge for different things. What seems to rarely beade public is what bit of what the councils do is costing the money
I remember a time when the National Coal Board used to do the payroll for a lot of the public sector organisations in the North-East - they had spare computer time and payroll is payroll. It's perfectly possible.
I think the problem is that councils have somehow convinced themselves they need to look businesslike - and that means having integrated systems that give them a realtime view of the council's financial position at every moment of the day and the "dashboards" favoured by the C-suite. Given that councils take budgetary decisions annually their necessary IT requirements are rather more modest. You'd think that if care for children, the elderly and the disabled had to be limited according to the council's means the same would be true of their internal expenditure.
The day a council manages to perform any such migration on time and on budget should be promoted to become a national holiday with special bunting and festivities.
Alternative would be to imprison the (remaining) highest ranking officer of the council(*) for each missed deadline and each budget overdraft until the project is successfully finished or they run out of council members to imprison, whichever happens first.
(*) Each council member to be imprisoned may assign the blame to the highest member of management of the delivering company/companies instead until they run out of C-suite heads to blame and imprison.
The problem here is that only bad news makes it to the press. Councils and other local government tiers number in their hundreds, if not more.These types of programmes are running all the time, so some of them must finish approximately on time and budget, otherwise we would be hearing about such things many times a month. And we don't.
Anybody looked whether there are figures published for successful vs. unsuccessful implementations of such things from a body such as the National Audit Office?
"Anybody looked whether there are figures published for successful vs. unsuccessful implementations of such things from a body such as the National Audit Office?"
Whilst not exclusively so, NAO generally become involved only when things are looking grim and have already gone wrong. It's a pity NAO don't issue an annual "when things go right" report, because public confidence in the public sector is extremely low, in large part because all they ever read about is the failures. But if I can throw in a private sector comparison, I worked for the energy sector for a decade or so and one of my roles was tracking the performance of all our competitors. During the period 2009-2015, five of the six then-largest suppliers "upgraded" their customer accounting and billing systems (mostly SAP, but at least one maybe two Oracle). Of those five players, all ran into various serious and expensive problems, resulting in customer debt write-offs, re-work, additional costs-to-serve, huge reputational damage, and repeated regulatory intervention and fines.
These IT upgrade SNAFUs are the same whether public, private or voluntary sector, but the private sector is far better able to hide these problems as there's little or no transparency. For private companies it is necessary to monitor a company very closely (as was my job) to spot when things are going badly wrong, and even then it required strong sector knowledge and availability of performance data from regulators.
The reason any ERP or CRM upgrade usually becomes a mess in both public and private sectors is because large organisations are change averse, it's what they do. Whether councils, energy suppliers, supermarkets, insurers, banks, pharma companies, airlines etc, large organisations exist to provide consistency, repeatability, low unit cost, and risk-aversion. They have slow, complicated decision making. They are inherently and by design ponderous rather than agile, conservative rather than innovative, introspective rather than fast-learners. Whilst they have all manner of project managers, PMOs, agile coaches, scrum masters, six sigma black belts, the reality is that they're designed to hold positions not to dance. Even their culture (which over-rides any strategy bullshit) is about that repeatability, about intentionally making change slow to impossible. Then, when it becomes "necessary" to change the IT infrastructure, it turns out that internal communication is not good for doing new stuff, knowledge turns out to reside in selected employees heads and not recorded elsewhere, experience of planning, costing, and executing large scale change is absent; Senior management of a stable organisation turn out to be exactly the wrong people to oversee and make decisions about such change, delegation and accountability are lacking, etc etc.
In both public and private sector, some of these large change projects go right - but they're the exception. In the local authority space, we often hear the idea of "why don't they find a working system and duplicate it", indeed I've made such comments myself. It can work - the sixth of the original big six energy suppliers, E.ON recently did this, but despite taking the system used by the best performing company (Octopus), E.ON were fined £5m twice last year for severe customer service failings, and languish at the bottom end of customer ratings in Which research.
"Senior management of a stable organisation turn out to be exactly the wrong people to oversee and make decisions about such change"
On the other hand, companies with a live fast and die young style of management either do spectacularly well up until the point somebody else buys them out, or they implode before making much impact.
A long time ago I briefly worked at a place where the manager/owner was taking everybody's time looking for The Next Best Thing and completely neglecting The Current Good Thing that was paying the bills.
"The day a council manages to perform any such migration on time and on budget... "
There was a brilliant podcast episode on this (probably Cautionary Tails) that showed both private and public secretary equally bad at large projects. It boiled down overconfidence in their own abilities, both supplier and purchase to get it right first time. It can't possibly go that badly....
"Alternative would be to"
Much less harsh than slinging people in prison is simply saying "you get paid on successful delivery of a functioning system".
The reason this endless shitshow continues is because councils are spending public money, so they don't care (just cut back on school and teen oriented projects, they're not voters) and outfits like Oracle have already received obscene payments so there's no impetus to do a good job when a bad job can run over time and budget and net more taxpayer cash.
Nobody has any pressing reason to do a better job, so they won't.
It seems that a lot of these reports are from re-platform projects. SAP to Oracle or vice-versa with a sprinkling of Microsoft occasionally. Re-platforming is CONSIDERABLY more complicated than upgrading and therefore more expensive and more likely to overrun - whatever the supposed savings the bullshitters salespeople tell you.
I'm a SAP bod but I've got nothing against Oracle, at least any more than I have against SAP.
While support might be being withdrawn in 2027 for the SAP R/3 platform (not guaranteed, by the way - could easily be extended), there are upgrade options to S/4 and many tools to support it, plus 3rd parties ready to take up support of R/3 when SAP exits. Upgrade projects are also a ball-ache but having worked on R/3 and S/4 you may find that many programs on S/4 are unchanged and your own custom code might still work, but that also depends of the version of R/3 you are coming from.
1. Changes at a high level that need to be implemented in the system e.g. Pension auto-enrollment, Real-time reporting to HMRC, BACS interface changes, etc.
2. Fixing vulnerabilities and bugs as they are discovered.
3. Automatic fail of an audit if your financial system has no support.
4: XYZ software only having a 5 year contract and there being a HUGE cost delta if you stick with 'em, vs incentives to jump ship
The issue of course being that those who sign off on it get congratulated for saving money without really caring if it costs more for those downhill to implement things and by the time things come to a head, they've moved onto new jobs
It's not avoiding the recognition of failure (which could still be the case, but is separate), but simply addressing the question of whether the work to date needs to be entirely written off, or can in fact be used as part of the ultimate system. In almost any floundering Sporacle fiasco, there's plenty of stuff that does work, a load of stuff that doesn't yet but can be made to work, as well as some bits that don't work and will need throwing away and re-doing.
“.. the council said it would re-platform the system to "a dedicated cloud environment by the end of 2023.”
An ERF system running on your own hardware or in “the cloud” still requires a high degree of skill and competence in design and implimentation. Something that is patently lacking here.
"The underpinning storage infrastructure currently used by SAP is very old, with increasingly failing components that can only be replaced by reconditioned parts"
WTF is he on about!
"WTF is he on about!"
I assumed that meant that they were still using various kinds of chunky data-centre type hardware dating from 2004 to run the system on, and that when something goes wrong, they have to search ebay for parts.
Should we ask about backups? (Icon)
He's talking utter bollocks. Storage is storage and can be upgraded (relatively) easily.
SAP can use any kind of storage and has multiple ways of implementing the latest storage types including in-memory (HANA).
What he means is "Our SAP storage system is old and crap because we haven't kept it up to date. Oh, and I also don't have a clue what I'm talking about, I'm just repeating someone else's rubbish".
Getting brown envelopes me thinks.
Like ours for the new system we went with. The consultant and the fuck whit head of IT said "This new system will stop people putting in bad data". The consultant was clearly getting brown envelopes for promoting the system, the head of IT has no IT knowledge and is a fuck whit.
What is happen now its live? People are inputting bad data and we have to pay the 3rd party, who now controls the database, lots of money to correct the bad data any time its entered.
"could the UK government not hired software devs themselves to develop a solution for all its councils, parishes and countys"
To be effective that would require standardisation of all council processes, a big job itself, but more than that for national government to interfere in local government that way would require new primary legislation. Government would need to draft and debate a green paper in both houses, then there's say two years behind the scenes work to to do the research and identify scope and options and consult the public and all stakeholders, with a white paper (policy) pushed through both houses towards the end of that time. Once the policy is set, then somebody has to draft and lay legislation, again more work, more parliamentary time, say a year. This is just to give government the powers to force councils to adopt standard processes, four+ years and at that point in time not a single standard process has been designed. Such intervention by national government risks being a hot-potato, to be subject to long winded legal challenge from from councils concerned their powers are being over-ridden, from the ill qualified busybodies who comprise the House of Lords, and from local authorities of a different party to the government who just want to throw a spanner in the works. Any objection of those types will likely end up in the supreme court, and add at least two years to the timeline. There will also be well funded legal and PR opposition from the likes of Sporacle who aren't going to give up this lucrative market without a good fight. Assuming central government can get the powers, they'd need more time to consult on the specifics of processes and the way they plan to procure and manage the new systems - at least another two years, and at the end of that time you'd be looking for your first candidate council to pilot the standard processes and IT.
From a political point of view it's a total non-starter, no self-interested MP is going to back a plan that takes an absolute minimum of seven years to even get started, will cost millions, has plenty of risks, and involves back office systems for councils, when barely a third of the population can be arsed to even vote in local elections. This may seem defeatist, but much of this is down to how democracy works. In countries that don't have democracy, change is much much easier.
All councils work within the same regulatory framework, deal with the same agencies, run the same highways to national standards, refuse, licensing services, run the same elections, collect the same taxes, deal with Central Government, liaise with the NHS …
If localisation has trashed that, it’s on the LA for bad decision making, plus central government on standards - for example the incoherent and inconsistent shitshow for recycling and bins.
Local Government Association’s anyone or similar. Same for UK Universities.
https://www.local.gov.uk/
https://www.cosla.gov.uk/
https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/
"All councils work within the same regulatory framework, deal with the same agencies, run the same highways to national standards, refuse, licensing services, run the same elections, collect the same taxes, deal with Central Government, liaise with the NHS …"
Localisation hasn't trashed standardisation because it never existed in the first place. You're right that the processes and IT could be standardised, but they are not and never have been, and nobody currently has the authority to mandate that they should. One might have thought that given cost pressures and the various screw ups and council "bankruptcies", LGA should be all over this, with a working group to create and maintain standard processes (or at least identify a council as a role model for having the least crap processes and low cost, stable systems) but as far as I can see they aren't.
You also have to note that although national government could give itself some powers in this space, local government is accountable to local electors, not to national government. And that's before we consider the low calibre of rather too many local councillors who mostly know nothing about running a large organisation, nothing about IT, nothing about change management or process design.
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