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Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

theregister.com

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Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#31

Post by justrealist »

stakhanov wrote: post #20
orwin wrote: post #5

Leaving Sap was a good idea, but i'm pretty sure replacing Sap by oracle ERP wasn't. Especially, it seems it's one to one in functionalities? The better idea is to take a more modular ERP imho, and slowly transition.

> The better idea is to take a more modular ERP imho, and slowly transition. ...or just imagine what £100M in bounties to open source developers could accomplish. It would probably get their requirements met and, as a side-effect, contribute billions to the world economy by liberating many others from lock-in, besides just Birmingham City Council. As it stands, all they seem to have accomplished with this ludicrous a…

Open-source only helps organizations that take ownership of their own design and decision-making.

Contracting disasters are always because the customer is trying to outsource thinking. Usually it ends poorly. Either way, you don't solve the problem with a configurable OSS tool.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#32

Post by throwuwu »

candiodari wrote: post #23
throwuwu wrote: post #21

What does ERP mean in this context? Asking because it means something else that is making all this discussion of ERP projects and consultants sound quite funny.

At one point I contributed to "Odoo" (OpenERP). It essentially means having lots of Applications work against a single database so that everything about the whole company uses this single database. ERP vendors generally have a whole bunch of standard applications ready. Things like inventory, sending out stuff, payroll (for X number of countries), ...

Thanks! Still does nothing to break the association with the other definition for me though so I’ll add ERP vendors to the list of things to giggle at

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#33

Post by candiodari »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #19
kodah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is to build purpose built software, but that would require this municipality to pay SWEs (among other folks) directly. An interesting case study would be if it were actually cheaper in the end to just employ some software engineers and write something catered to themselves.

Yeah, I don't think it would be any cheaper, or any likely to meet success. Succesful software development is hard, whether you hire a consultancy or are a non-software company trying to create an in-house department. Software around workflow (an ERP) is one of the most challenging areas. Because it is hard to shoe-horn it into a universal pattern, or figure out what a given organization actually needs (not always wh…

Given that Oracle ERP licences start at 100k per year for small-to-medium companies, NOT including hardware or let's say 2 years of consultancy to get it installed in the first place.

Big enterprises pay a lot more and will have to maintain all sorts of operations folks anyway, so I'm pretty sure you could have a team of, say, 5 SWEs for less than and ERP system. Especially for less than Oracle.

Also there are at this point plenty of open source ERPs you could start from.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#34

Post by terminalcommand »

pjc50 wrote: post #28
KptMarchewa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.

Is Istanbul a single unitary local authority or done by boroughs/arrondisements?

Istanbul has an elected mayor and a local parlament. The current mayor is Ekrem İmamoğlu.

Big cities in Turkey have a single metropolitan municipality each. Below the metropolitan municipality each district also has its own local mayor and local parlament. They have a duty sharing system.

For example water and public transportation is responsibilty of the metropolitan municipality. Collecting property taxes is responsibility of the smaller local municipalities etc.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#35

Post by fredoralive »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #24
daenney wrote: post #8

"The UK's biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster". There's really no need to rope in the whole continent for a specific thing in a specific country. The fact that they're the biggest local authority by population in Europe is really not relevant to anything that's happening here.

I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.

It's a bit of a weird semi-pedantic stats claim, they're basically counting "largest lowest level of government". Birmingham is a large unitary authority, there are no district or borough councils below it. Looking at Wikipedia Istanbul seems to be split into districts which have their own local governments (similar to London with its boroughs). So they're counting the 514,900 population of Başakşehir or 259,146 of Hackney vs the 1.1 million of Birmingham, rather than the total populations of Istanbul or Greater London.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#36

Post by AngeloAnolin »

Not surprised.

Enterprise software is always *enter-pricey*.

Lots of $$$ poured into consultants and very little to the folks who actually do the work and implementation.

And of course, a project (or program in corporate speak) of this magnitude will have a lot of meetings involving a lot of people that usually ends up in very meaningless decisions.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#37

Post by toyg »

pjc50 wrote: post #27

This happens a lot . Another way of looking at it is that this is a successful outcome for Oracle, because they've hugely increased their billable hours. Councils are I think too small to access GDS? If they could I'm sure the superior GDS project management would mitigate this kind of disaster. I remember when the University of Cambridge had a similar disaster and ultimately published an inquiry: https://www.admin.c…

> Councils are I think too small to access GDS?

Councils probably don't want to access GDS. Why lose all those sweet vendor kickbacks? Free ticket to this, free travel to that...

There is a lot of corruption in Britain at the lower level of government. It's all in plain sight, it's all legal, and because it benefits the same networks (someone would say "classes") that are structurally in power in Westminster, nothing gets done about it.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#38

Post by revelio »

toyg wrote: post #37
pjc50 wrote: post #27

This happens a lot . Another way of looking at it is that this is a successful outcome for Oracle, because they've hugely increased their billable hours. Councils are I think too small to access GDS? If they could I'm sure the superior GDS project management would mitigate this kind of disaster. I remember when the University of Cambridge had a similar disaster and ultimately published an inquiry: https://www.admin.c…

> Councils are I think too small to access GDS? Councils probably don't want to access GDS. Why lose all those sweet vendor kickbacks? Free ticket to this, free travel to that... There is a lot of corruption in Britain at the lower level of government. It's all in plain sight, it's all legal, and because it benefits the same networks (someone would say "classes") that are structurally in power in Westminster, nothing…

Birmingham council is run by Labour but Westminster is run by the Conservatives. Unless by classes you mean all politicians, it's not the case that it's all linked back to central government.

Besides, corruption isn't needed to explain this. ERP projects fail all the time, with SAP as well.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#39

Post by pelorat »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #24
daenney wrote: post #8

"The UK's biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster". There's really no need to rope in the whole continent for a specific thing in a specific country. The fact that they're the biggest local authority by population in Europe is really not relevant to anything that's happening here.

I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.

No one living here considers Turkey to be part of Europe

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#40

Post by denton-scratch »

candiodari wrote: post #23
throwuwu wrote: post #21

What does ERP mean in this context? Asking because it means something else that is making all this discussion of ERP projects and consultants sound quite funny.

At one point I contributed to "Odoo" (OpenERP). It essentially means having lots of Applications work against a single database so that everything about the whole company uses this single database. ERP vendors generally have a whole bunch of standard applications ready. Things like inventory, sending out stuff, payroll (for X number of countries), ...

> Things like inventory, sending out stuff, payroll (for X number of countries),

Long before I ever heard of ERP, I worked on the Burroughs accounting systems. They had inventory management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, subcontractor accounting etc., all feeding into the general ledger.

So is that really what ERP is? Is it what used to be called an accounting package?

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