Oracle finance system at Europe's largest city council still falls short 2.5 years later An Oracle-based ERP system used by Europe's largest local authority is still not "safe and compliant" two-and-a-half years after it went live and has "effectively crippled the council's ability to manage and report on finances," according to external auditors. The cloud-based Fusion system went live in April 2022, before …
That's easy to answer - pay for both of them!
As they are still using the SAP system at a cost of around £5.1m/year. Said system has been heavily customized over its 25 year life.
As SAP was viewed as ruinously expensive, the plan had been to go with a vanilla Oracle install. The wider business rejected the vanilla option resulting in years of additional work and avoiding making tough decisions.
I believe the Oracle solution does cost less than the SAP solution and was due for delivery in 2021, but who knows when it will be fit for purpose having failed two years audits.
"Lastly, the top-level managers in the council were faced with juggling a number of priorities, including a certain level of self-interest."
I know this is evident in the way BCC appointed an Oracle expert in order to review the project to see whether it should be torn up and a new path taken - who then amazingly said BCC should stick with the Oracle implementation - but this part needs further investigation and talking about. This is corruption, and is more than just a throw away line at the end of an article.
What utter, utter bastards BCC are. And we're all suffering because of their fetish for brown envelopes.
The review of the Oracle system was after 2 years of Oracle implementation - if they went to SAP HANA, they would have had the sunk costs of Oracle licensing and implementation, an additional cost for SAP HANA, 2+ years of implementation AND the ongoing costs of their existing SAP platform.
And it would likely have resulted in a new governance committee repeating all the same mistakes Birmingham made with their Oracle implementation.
There a full write ups on an alternative weekly computer website that detail the problems - and the £5m/year cost of the existing SAP system is a big contributor (i.e. The 4 additional years it has taken so far have cost £20m without any money going to Oracle or consultants, just the "status quo").
And the consultants potentially (ok, that's unlikely...) delivered an Oracle system that exactly matched what the Council asked for. Only to have non-IT parts of the Council revert to a requirement of "this must be a like for like replacement for SAP".
And I haven't even touched on unknown entities "forgot" to enable auditing on the system which meant 18 months of transactions were untraceable (https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/25/birmingham_oracle_audit_trail/) - it was likely a management decision to reduce storage costs but maybe someone just forgot?
...should be fired, banned from local government, surcharged to pay back some of the money they have lost and investigated by the old bill. Including Oracle. None of this will happen.
We need to use less tech, simpler tech (and more reliable/secure/offline tech) to avoid this sort of thing in future. We won't.
When tech costs this much and fails this badly, it is a problem not a solution.
By the time they get it working, if they ever do, they will need a replacement, as component parts of it will be EOL'd. I dare say they will run with Oracle for that too!
I can guarantee this was promises made & then refusing to go to the customer and say "we can't di this" & "if you want it, it'll add 6 months to the project "
The number of projects where either cowardice of explaining stuff upwards has kiboshed it or an arrogant PMO who insist on over riding the SMEs on something which then snowballs into a total fuck storm
Projected cost: £130million. Number of residents under BCC remit: close to 1.2 million. Cost per resident to get his far: £108 per person.
For a project designed to help them figure out how and where to spend money, it's become wonderfully self-serving.
The mind boggles. Best of all, I'll wager no one gets to be held accountable (see what I did there?) because that could well question the entire structure local governance relies on.
I often wonder if an off the shelf trusted and established application, with internal support staff can create a better and MORE FLEXIBLE service. My experience ends in 1997 when the benefit agency brought in consultants to look at the IT services, and they scrapped in house solutions and contracted out. The results were as you would expect. I remember we could not ask for bugs to be fixed because it had been signed off and we could only make a handful of “feature requests” per year
It's 2025 and someone, is fu**ing up another accounts application. Bearing in mind that accounts packages were just about the first ever commercial application sold on computers to paying customers.
You hire an Oracle person and WTF did you think they would recommend?
and
""Senior officers with responsibility for the safe delivery of the program faced conflicting priorities to keep to budget, avoid further delay, and protect reputations,""
3 guesses which of these that motherf**ker chose to prioritise.
"Reputation"? Theirs went down the shi**er when it became over 1 year late.
Note how the end users are vigorously kept out of the loop. Heaven forbid they might know things that might make the implementation effective.
Can someone explain to me what safety means in the context of what amounts to fancy accounting software? I can understand how flight control software for an aircraft could be described as unsafe if it contained bugs that led to a fiery crash, but I'm really struggling with the concept in this case.
Is it just another example of our language has being corrupted to the point where words are losing all meaning? A bit like when a person hears something not to their liking, their "safety" can now be said to be compromised?
Auditing was enabled in Oracle in August 2023 after an "oversight" - if I was wagering money on it I would suggest it was done to reduce hardware or storage requirements as the fix required additional hardware purchases.
For multi-year contracts that were entered prior to auditing being enabled, the council is unsure if details were entered correctly as there's no auditing - as pre-August 2023 contracts age out of the system, they will eventually get to the point where they have either have full audit data for spending or have reviewed any contracts that weren't audited to get to the point where they are confident that the figures being produced are correct.
Unfortunately, like all councils, BCC is run by politicians for whom long term is the next election (5 years or less).
I doubt that any of the people responsible for the decision making process are any more computer knowledgeable than clippy. "It looks like you're writing a letter ..."
To my knowledge there is no single software package that will deal with the complexity of running a council (even the BCC clowncil) without extensive customisation. Expecting vanilla oracle to work out of the box it naive in the extreme (I'm being generous here).
One of the other issues is that "consultants" are often selectred on the basis of some that a councillor met in the 19th hole of the golf club - and yes, I am serious about this, I've seen it happen.
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