Enquiry please
I'm very grateful to The Reg for giving time for Lindsay Clark's detailed and thorough reporting of these issues. I'm getting more information from here than from any of the Birmingham press sites. Just some questions (and an opinion)...
"Birmingham City Council did not tell its official auditors [...]"
Should that not be 'Birmingham City Council Officers did not'? There was a change of political administration part way through this saga and previous articles have suggested that a group of council officers decided to start asking for customisations of the Oracle system.
"During the meeting, Councillor Lee Marsham, a Labour member of the audit committee, called for an inquiry into the Oracle ERP implementation."
YES PLEASE. And could that enquiry's scope include questioning around the suitability of the original Oracle system for running the audit function of a large and complex corporation in the UK without customisation? I have doubts about that. Lindsay Clark's previous reporting has already pointed out that school accounts in Birmingham are now 'out of scope' for the system.
"Stocks said the council had to be ready for the required business change to adopt Oracle's standard processes. "You do have to drive change because the things have to change within how departments work and how you implement the next ERP system because it can't go wrong again. I don't think any of us can survive if it goes wrong again," he told the committee."
Are these Oracle 'standard processes' documented in public anywhere? Are they fit for the tasks required? Who decides that now? We know that many Oracle implementations both in public sector organisations and in commercial concerns are having problems.