Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen. A report published by the UK council's Corporate Finance Overview and Scrutiny Committee found that 18 months after Fusion went live, the largest public authority in Europe "had not …
I don't see any reason to introduce left-right arguments here. Councils have got into trouble and gone bust under both side: Northamptonshire (RIP) was solidly Tory as was Thurrock when they gambled and lost on solar farms. Croydon Council, on the other hand, was Labour controlled when it went bust, in part because it decided that buying a loss-making hotel would be a good idea.
There are also problems cause by a squeeze on central funding, of course, but these are as non-partisan as the incompetent foot-shooting we see too often.
"The council initially customized Oracle but now plans to reimplement the software out-of-the-box, adopting standardized processes."
I used to blame vendors for bad implementations. Then I showed up at a site where the customer had paid a contractor to write **2 million lines** of custom script to re-implement much of the existing functionality of the software. And we only caught it because they were complaining about how unbelievably slow the software was. Since then, I've watched for "customizations", and contractors absolutely LOVE to charge customers for re-implementing existing functionality.
The moment I hear "customization" I know it's the customer/implementer's fault.
I think "out-of-the-box" is the biggest red flag of all.
If you're going to sell me software "out of the box", you'd best be ready to turn up with an actual box. And then show me how to install it from the contents of the box. And show me the active forums and communities where I can get support for free.
If you can't do that, then I hope for your sake that your box is thin and smooth, because it will hurt a lot less that way.
What happens when you take the most technologically disinclined part of your business and clash directly with complex software, technology, and clueless consulting/outsourcing? Miserable failure, always.
Now add Oracle being an unmitigated disaster to work with as a company and a solution.
Well, the ERP I implemented (I was functional team lead) at a leading university back last century was reasonably OK. In fact it has been upgraded a few times over the decades as new versions were released and it is still in daily use today. But that doesn't make particularly good headlines.
FWIW I've also implemented Oracle at a number of sites quite successfully and remained on good terms with the users even after changing jobs. But again, no-one cares about those sorts of stories. I can't help wonder whether the rot on large ERP systems started when system integrators started to use the cheapest possible resources, regardless of where they were located. I say that having worked for one multinational who subcontracted a lot of development work to a large international organisation based on another continent. Some of their developers were fine, some were sent home almost immediattely as they could barely spell PL/SQL let alone write code in it.
Buy cheap, buy twice.
I'll now go and polish my halo
It always surprises me in these type of operations that the old systems are just flat abandoned without any attempt to prove the new system first. I guess these are ample proof of the old adage, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
Well, there's variations of the TSB scenario "we have to be off $oldSystem by $deadline because the licence / support cessation / my remuneration bonus says so".
Those joining the circus after the start of the performance will be confronted by existing player reputations shackled to the sunk cost fallacy.
Systems that complex are not turn-key; migration can take months of extra work and expense before the realisation dawns that flashy new system isn't really working or can't cope. Migrating back is politically unacceptable [read suicidal] so everyone keeps hoping that a little more effort (and a few more millions) will make everything right.
Don't forget graft. With every large, well-funded government program with little oversight there are always local consultants around to collect a share of the funds. Audit trails would reveal who they are and how many of them are friends or family of the Council leadership.
This is what I don’t understand with these big systems.
Most councils need the same core functions, collect taxes, pay staff, fund services, buy things.
All of which is fundamentally the same if you are Rutland or Birmingham. So why does eve ry local authority seem to want to do things differently, it would probably make more profit for the supplier to offer a standard package to multiple councils and charge for support. Easier for them to support and update the software (more profit) and less risk for the people running it.
But is that a case of common sense…
Have you ever met a politician? Like, sat and talked to them in their off hours? Or any time they are not in public or behind closed doors making deals?
They are all, with only one of two exceptions, the biggest narcissists you will EVER meet. And not the vain boorish kind either. The dangerous, self aggrandizing psychopath kind.
Hence, they MUST have their will imposed on the system.
Maybe the constantly changing requirements that are forced down from central government are part of the problem?
Procurement is also a large part part of the problem because the private sector uses procurement as a way to fleece the public sector at every opportunity.,
The procurement process is primarily to prevent the public sector from being sued by unsuccessful responses. In the evaluation of the tender you cannot use any prior experience you may have with the respondent as grounds to mark it down (it is never up in my experience).
The result is that completely inappropriate decisions get made as the arseholes in private sector tendering teams know all this and write the tender accordingly.
This is spot on regarding procurement, with the big IT vendors historically amassing huge profits from the public purse. Even when they are shown to be delivering a system late and falling far short of requirements. Look at Fujitsu and the whole Post Office debacle. They had a proof of concept code mish mash, not fit for mass rollout, yet applied huge pressure on the UK Government to take it.
The problem is exacerbated, to use your own language, by there being arseholes on the public sector procurement side. Individuals with insufficient appropriate training, skills, ability, knowledge or experience to deal with IT procurement but with the arrogance to believe they can. Procuring a complex software system, especially one with bespoke modifications is an extremely challenging thing to do and giving the task to someone experienced at sourcing paper clips is a recipe for failure. So the underlying problem is incompetence due to people being in the wrong jobs. In my experience people rarely turn down a more senior role on the grounds they are not sufficiently competent to do it.
Local authorities are very different from businesses - consider the legal requirement for each item of expenditure to be traceable directly to a council vote, the hundreds of statutory obligations, and contrast those with ‘maximise shareholder benefit’ - a system designed for global commerce is a rotten fit and Oracle has clearly been mis-sold or purchased regardless of its inappropriateness.
As to why local councils don’t club together to invest in shared tech, or hire more and smarter people, consider the burgeoning of social costs dumped upon them by Westminster, the evisceration of their funding over the last 15 years, the forced sale of council assets (worth billions just in the Birmingham context) at distress prices, accompanied by legal prohibitions on reinvestment (and the ruinous requirement to store proceeds at top (bogus) rates, it turned out with criminal bankers in Iceland) and theft through privatisation in the specific case of the locally-funded water and sewerage systems. The second city is being crushed by the first and this fracas is symptomatic.
No way is that ever going to be a standard part of any mfg based IT system.
It just isn't.
Conceptually it should just be like a vote of the Board of a company, but IIRC there is no such requirement to link decisions back to Board level discussions, hence no built-in support for it in the core systems.
Which means that it will have to be bolted on even the normal business-y type stuff which Oracle might do as well as SAP.
There's also the issue that councils are meant to be somewhat customised to local needs anyway, rather than rebadged versions of Capita+Veolia+Oracle+Multi academy trust. No, they probably don't need deep customisation and cooperation would be good, but there's a lot of pressure to go with big vendors.
I've probably given before the example of libraries NI, which is now run on some fairly generic US-centric software, staffed with lots of layers of management (except at the actual branch level which is increasingly agency staff) and makes purchasing decisions based heavily on what publishers suggest to them. It's the end result of a sort of efficiency driven managerialism which loses sight of what is actually meant to be being achieved.
(Edit, how could I forget Capita?)
Funny you should say that.
The stuff I'm thinking of was developed by a SW house set up by what was McDonnel-Douglas and using their own (IIRC) in house language.
Again, IIRC it was quite popular among a bunch of UK libraries.
Not sure if anyone uses it today, but under that windows UI who knows?
iirc, El Reg reported a while back on Surrey Police who thought they knew best and developed their own (disasterous) IT system... and then bought the same off the shelf system as the neighbouring forces, with the unintended consequence of interoperability and improved intgelligence (aka data) sharing leading to more offenders being caught.
Shame they had to waste tens of millions before they saw the (flashing blue) light.
Crazy isn't it? I'm not sure how true it was, but I was on a training course years ago with a lady who worked for the local NHS authority. She told me that they were strictly forbidden from using the same system as other NHS authorities due to issues relating to monopolies and tendering law, so they all had to specify and procure separately. May have been cobblers, but it sounds completely plausible and if so would likely be the case for local councils as well. It's like in schools - you'd imagine all schools need very similar systems, stationary, supplies, etc., but all have their own systems & supply contracts. It's that age-old dilemma between local flexibility & entrepreneurialism, versus centralised consistency & economies of scale.
The problem at the moment is that if the current government tried to standardize it they'd be accused by the right-wing press of being communists and denying market forces, so you can't really win. Of course, based on previous attempts at centralised government IT procurement, it'd probably also go horribly wrong, end up costing a bazillion quid, achieving nothing except weighty bonuses for Capita/Infosys/TCS/[insert other big name consulting brands here] execs, before being canned after 4 years when the next government comes in.
The GLC and Inner London Education Authority had it's own stationery and similar items supplier, selling the items to the schools on a not for profit basis. A team of committed and skilled buyers seemed to get us really good prices. It was a monopoly, so hated by certain politicians. Funnily enough, killing the ILEA and removing that monopoly supplier didn't make purchases any cheaper.
This.
And let's see the logic here.
I'm betting something like this.
CIO* "Oracle is the best system. I did this in my old job and I called up my Salesman Gavin* from there and he said 'Stand on me Oracle is the bo***x for local authority work as well' so I'm starting the roll-out the first of next month, so we can get the discount and Gavin can get it on this years commission."
Because it is clear that someone at senior level decided that one ERP system that was built focussed on mfg, should be replaced by another ERP system focussed on mfg and with limited in house skills to support it.
TBH signing up the biggest local authority in Europe (true that, not just the UK) would make it a great reference site for any SW system, but it also makes a great anti- reference site so anyone looking at Oracle for an LA implementation can think "Well, they f**ked up what should have been a flagship site for them, so what sort of brain-dead halfwits will they palm off on us?"
*Names and roles have been changed to protect the guilty.
"and, because the council chose not to use system audit features, it cannot tell if fraud has taken place on its multibillion-pound spending budget for an 18-month period.”
Oh I think we can all agree that fraud absolutely HAS taken place somewhere; it’s just it can never be shown. Convenient that, no?
Hoping my invoice for £4.5m of Covid killing door knob wipes gets through before the auditing is turned on. Due to limitations in the field length, they were listed as 'Knob wipes', which may not help keep them under the radar.
You would like to think that those responsible for this would be shafted in some way, but everyone in British politics is likely to be incompetent, corrupt or both. Given how few people would be left if punishments were actually imposed, the system is designed to let them get away with it.
I was part of the team that built their SAP systems (2006-7, not 1999!). It was an expensive project because of the scale (Birmingham is the biggest local authority in Europe after all, and they wanted a lot of customisation) but very successful, and we had ZERO issues after go live. We built ECC, BW, CRM, SRM, Portal and more. It seems as if this ill-fated Oracle project was some bureaucrat's way of stamping their authority, when tweaking the already working and compliant SAP system would have been much cheaper and much less likely to go so ridiculously wrong.
I've worked many SAP projects and never seen one with the inability to reconcile anything, let alone not be able to certify accounts!
Consider
1)Complex data migration issues guaranteed. ICL/Fujitsu mainfram anyone?
2)Internationalisation needed if you want to sell this outside the US
3)Complex and changing regulations
4)Complex, sometimes nonsensical processes
On the upside you don't have to worry about the FCA breathing down your neck as Council Tax is not regulated by them*
In days gone by there would a niche SW house handling this area that on one (outside of local government) had ever heard of but were known for doing very solid work. Someone like Cerner used to be for hospital informations (because unlike their competitors they integrated legacy systems like microfilm for patient records and X-ray film storage). Just because the PHB has heard of them doesn't guarantee they will be any good at all.
*"Treating the customer fairly? LOL. Now pay up or we send you to prison"
> Local Authorities are a *specialist* field
The rot was introduced by Thatcher and the idea that councils were like businesses and so should be able to use COTS packages aimed at business rather than the more costly sector specific systems they were using… obviously, with central government tightening the purse strings, local government had little choice but to go cheap…
Its the same genius as charging for public transport.
The gov wants people to use public transport, so they add barriers all over the place which make it even slower and less safe. The money they earn is barely anything because of all the costs, and anyway its far cheaper to make it free siply because the road maintainance and building new roads would drop significantly. No the opposite happens because they want too pretend they are a business instead of remember why they exist.
I may have mentioned before, but from experience with our local council, some of their systems are still using legacy software which runs in a DOS box under windows. Some of the software has been out of support for over 15 years to the best of my knowledge, but it still works. Their IT systems are outsourced and quite a bit of the software has been customised when out of the box systems would have worked fine. I am willing to bet that many of the customisations are not properly documented.
The main issue with council systems is the integration of all the different parts which for an individual may include Council Tax (with e.g. single person discounts where applicable), disability living allowances, social housing, highways (including car parks, road repairs, street lighting and road cleaning), waste & recycling services, housing & supported accommodation, planning & building control, education, support for vulnerable people, social care, policing etc etc.
Any single person may have issues that overlap several different topics and it is the integration of these individual needs that causes many of the issues.
It would have been far more sensible to have migrated the services over a period of time running them in parallel to get them debugged and properly integrated rather than try making a single massive switch.
But there again, it's politicians and the only thing they are renowned for around here is lining their own pockets and furthering their political careers. Ryman recently ordered in another batch of brown envelopes so it will all be OK in the end, none of the councillors will be held to blame. [/SARCASM OFF]
Without doxxing myself too much (probably not at all...), the local council has a portal which appears to use the same login but be divided into completely different sections with arbitrary routes into forms and pages from the portal that sometimes just take you to a completely empty (as in no fields) form. Absolutely no desire to know what's at the back end. Submitting a change of details in my council tax recently resulted in two further statements being issued, payment not being taken, so getting pushed back onto the rest of the year and then finally adjusted downwards. All sort of worked out at the end of the day, but you do sort of wonder what's going on behind the scenes.
They know that they (Labour) will never get voted out so the do not give a dam about mess ups and a poorly run council as the Party has the city so stitched up so they will get voted back in time and time again. The old saying put a red rosette on a Donkey and the voters will vote for it is true here. They have raised the Council tax by 10% this year and it will be 10% next and probably 5% the year after that. do in all that is 25% over 3 years.
Got a similar situation in Northamptonshire, the long time Conservative controlled county council, adopted true blue financial policies and went bust. The reorganisation should have restructured things, however, the same faces etc reappeared in the new councils, and guess what, running the same true blue financial policies….
Let's try a few "facts" shall we?
Earlier AC said implementation was 2006-7 when wiki said Birmingham had no overall control
The perfect recipe for some persuasive-but-over-ambitious IT Director to "offer" a solution with no one with the majority to say "This is BS."
And let's not forget that this is the Council that fought for a decade to argue that the Equal Pay Act 1970 didn't apply to them, and then spent a further decade f**king up the re-grading process, so they are in court again.
I think there's plenty of blame to go round between Ahole Councillors and Ahole "Officers" of the Council.
Personally I'd chase down these di**hits and serve a few "Liability Orders" on them, as they do to people for unpaid council tax (but for rather larger sums).
This s**t will continue (from any party) until Councillors and Officers get the message that a)It's not your money, it's tax and rent payers money and b)Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
Can someone translate the words quoted from the report into the Queen's English?
"Tactically stabilized"? "Rebuild its corporate core"? "Transform its target operation model"?
If the government-designated "experts" cannot think, speak, and write about the problem clearly, they will not solve it.
I just googled for "ERP" and got this definition from SAP's website: "ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, which is a software system that helps organizations streamline their core business processes -- including finance, HR, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and procurement -- with a unified view of activity and provides a single source of truth."
This is just too much. Don't even try it. It's a mega-huge, Katamari Damacy-style sticky-ball of everyone's wish lists, and it won't help "streamline" anything.
Instead, use intelligent, problem-solving employees who know how to use computers as effective tools (rather than those who use them as hammers to drive in screws).
use intelligent, problem-solving employees
Why not use low paid local authority employees who are either hanging in til retirement or spending every morning on LinkedIn looking for something better?
Then code the processes into workflows in the tool so they can't forget anything or skip out steps and use those workflows to link the modules you actually need.
@AC 12 Nov/10:05 GMT:
If you've ever been forced into a time-wasting and/or ineffective workflow because the entire corporation uses, and forces you to use, such a system, you know the answer to your question.
Requests for system mods are rejected on cost- or office-politics-grounds.
This happens because basically no one ever who sells finance / HR / stock control / sales / pick-a-thing software has ever grasped the concept of bulk data import and export. You end up with some utter freaking monstrosity of a product that does "all the things" because it means you don't have to do some variation of this:
I have lost track of how many examples of this sort of shit I've encountered over the years. When you ask "Why are you doing this?" and the answer is that there's no standard input/output handling for any of the involved packages.
Occasionally I've managed to write the odd short program that can do this sort of thing, but I did on one occasion do so and reduce what was a week long task performed by the admin office of one academic institution I worked for into a "Run this program and then type in your password. Watch the progress bar for approximately 15 seconds." type process. I was told that they couldn't possibly use it and that I should never tell anyone, because as things were they had a whole member of extra staff assigned to them during the first month of the year to handle this, and they didn't want to lose the headcount and associated bump to the department budget.
There are many antipodean Local Government Organizations, with the very same problems, full of crayola wielding wisdom, that think by offering 5 figure salaries for 6 figure skill sets is the cheap way to deploy Larry's digital card file programs..
These are typically the same organizations that never meet budget, as they need to contract in the 6 figure skill set, who do then the shiznit, but won't pay for the documenting of same, then the hired help beetles off with all the public's shiny coins, usually more than 6 figures worth, with a smile on their faces knowing the crayola wielding clowns will call again for break fix, time and time again ...
Until the local population takes away the crayon cretin's implements, these org's will continue the fail cycle, but the problem is human nature, come election time, they believe the newly scribbled wisdom provided by a different colored pack of crayons, is more appealing, thus again failing to notice the use of crayons, at election time.
These big "ERP" projects always seem to start with "It'll save £X Squillion" But I've never read any explanation that defines how. Beyond an implication that somehow it'll use fewer staff.
Then there is the assumption that all the various activities can be a) trapped b) defined c) crystallised into a computer programme.
Then there's the assumption that the chosen package will be able to encompass all of these within its fold.
There is a big gulf between "That process can be done better on a computer" and "These processes can be done better if they're all glued into one big complex computer system".
And I have a nasty suspicion that that last big assumption is made very early on.
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