Mega-city's Oracle system won't have effective cash management until 2025 Europe’s largest local authority will not have a fully functioning cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP system intended to perform the task. Birmingham City Council’s plan to switch from SAP to software from Big Red has seen its budget balloon from £20 million ($26 million) to …
A single city is hardly "Byzantine". The real snag is incompetence and you can obviously split that up into four lots of incompetence and still achieve the same result.
You might as well say: Why not split the UK up into four separate units? .. oh it is ... and its not exactly the most efficient setup ever. I'm not sure why England can't also describe itself as devolved 8)
I know the direction of travel for UK politics over the past few decades is devolution and I'm a supporter in the main. I don't trust our central government to do much of anything, so the less power at the centre the better. However, given the constant stories of local council IT project failures and security blunders, would we not be better off with one central system for managing all council IT. I know central government's record on large projects is pretty bad but once we have the five years and £50 billion over budget project finished, then councils can get on with the job they are meant to do. We won't have civil servants trained in accountancy or planning attempting to run huge IT projects.
Admittedly not my idea but one I picked up in the comments on El Reg. As pointed out by others the councils won't like it but they all do essentially the same job. I'll be upset when Palantir get the contract but happy when my council has enough time and money to get essential services working properly.
The only people less competent than central government in running and outsourcing things in the UK, especially tech, are local government. Devolution means that the gravy train will become a veritable shinkansen of loot moving from tax revenue to private pockets. And every local authority will deploy their own unique apps for car parking, LTN tolls, bridge tolls, tram tickets, local discount cards and all the rest. Driving across a county border will require a great deal of research, planning and handing over of cash. If you thought losing free movement across the EU was bad enough, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Indeed.
Pavement parking is a case in point.
Edinburgh (Capita I think) have already rolled it out and are happily fining people.
Glasgow (again Capita) were going to roll it out but hit 'snags' with the software so can't start happily fining people until September.
One would have thought that Capita would have happily rolled out the same software to both councils which they've been using for various London councils for decades and charged them both for the 'customisations' as usual which would no doubt be very similar in both cases.
But it seems not. No doubt Glasgow wanted all the bells and whistles or somesuch.
Devolution within the same legal framework with common shared core systems underneath you.
FTFY.
*The NHS is an example of choice gone mad with hundreds of Trusts all doing same thing ‘with a local take’ on everything duplicating and complicating everything- inc basic mandatory training that should be a single national thing.
All Trusts have a CEO, FD, IT Team, Property Team, People Team, Procurement Team etc ……
Yes.
The split of duties between Birmingham and West Midlands is not exactly the same as between for example Salford and Greater Manchester or Westminster and Greater London. For example, Birmingham is responsible for issuing taxi licences, Westminster is not.
Birmingham is not on the coast or in a rural area, so there might be some duties involving those that just aren't relevant to Birmingham at all.
But have a standardised system with different modules, and each council can pick the ones relevant to its duties.
There used to be such an organisation - standards (they created ITIL, SSADM, PRINCE), hosting, systems, tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency
It was shut down/sold off and the remnants are now in the cabinet office doing endless rounds of procurement frameworks.
-- is devolution and I'm a supporter in the main --
Ever lived in Scotland?
Maybe part of the problem is to much local freedom to choose and decide things. Simplistically there is no difference between cities or towns apart from scale. They should all be providing the same services and facilities to their residents. I accept that in some cases (eg swimming pools in a village of a couple of hundred) the number of those facilities would be zero and in others could be hundreds.
However, having seen the almost total balls up of NPfIT I do wonder about a central authorities ability to get anything right.
...the council will not have a fully functioning cash system until April 2025.
You Brits are happy gamblers betting on all horses... What are the odds if I want to put money on the council(*) for a bet that they have a functional cash system on time?
(*) No, silly, not using the council's administrative system, of course.
My mother paid BCC £65 to have her green bins collected at the beginning of the year. She's only had one of them collected in that time, every other time they've refused as they can't see her payment.
So I would say you'd be as well to put your mortgage on a Biden win in November than BCC having a functional cash system in 2025.
I'd really love to know why public agencies continue to give contracts to companies that fail constantly. The number of times I've read about Oracle contracts going titsup and being scrapped (or years delayed or both) is incredible.
Stop doing business with Oracle if they suck so badly. Maybe the problem is that SAP and other companies of its ilk are no better.
Would any of us work in local authority when we can earn more monies elsewhere not surrounded by collegues who are there because they couldn't make it in the private sector.... been there!
Printing our way out of natural recession cycles has resulted in this mess
Only then do good people end up applying for the safer "goverment jobs"
Recession.... bring it on baby :)
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