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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

#41

Post by laputan_machine »

revelio wrote: post #38
toyg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They're all the politician class. Labour don't represent the lower classes any better than the tories imo.

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

#42

Post by candiodari »

throwuwu wrote: post #32
candiodari wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A great deal of complex software "paradigms" aren't nearly as complex as they appear to be at first glance.

Most of these are built on a gimmick, the same as in the Open Source world. Every database has "their thing". Mysql "is fast and simple". PostgreSQL supports everything you could possibly want.

Oracle has their "fantastic" SQL compatibility and their fast clustering solutions. SAP has their "live indexes". Of course, both have implemented each other's features, and so has PostgreSQL at this point. So that apparently makes them great developers of timesheet software, right? Apparently to MBAs this makes sense.

These companies are essentially consultancy software development companies that have an in-house "core" software (Oracle, SAP, ...) that they can work with really well (in theory), and have standard solutions for many problems on that core. But 3 ABAP developers aren't that different from 3 PHP developers: they all do things slightly differently. And, yes, I do think SAP ABAP is "kind of" PHP. You can even make it look pretty similar, though it uses their internal stuff, not HTML. These companies are selling "quick" and "standard" business software development.

There are major differences too, though. SAP stores all it's code in the database itself, which prevents all development tools, from vim over git to CI/CD from working.

Of course this would mean Wordpress is ERP software ... and it kind of is, with enough plugins.

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

#43

Post by generic92034 »

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.

> Leaving Sap was a good idea

From the article: "Standard SAP is the same, but BCC customized SAP to get it working really well and apart from some minor annoyances, SAP was a good product that should never have been ditched," the insider said.

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

#45

Post by denton-scratch »

stareatgoats wrote: post #15
phkahler wrote: post #4

Does ERP really need customisation? That seems to be a big cost driver as well as causing lock-in.

> Does ERP really need customisation? Yes, for a number of reasons: 1. An ERP system consists of thousands of modules, out of which a smaller subset is needed by the customer. One typically pays by module so you want your number of modules to be as small as possible. 2. A customer this size has already implemented a number of business processes that they are not willing to sacrifice, even though an ERP provider will…

> not be on the same level playing field as the competition.

Birmingham City Council doesn't have competition.

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

#46

Post by _Wintermute »

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…

Reminds me of the University of Edinburgh this year with their own Oracle disaster, seems like it was largely on time and budget, it just didn't work: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/23/edinburgh_university_...

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

#47

Post by revelio »

laputan_machine wrote: post #41
revelio wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're all the politician class. Labour don't represent the lower classes any better than the tories imo.

Doesn't really make sense to say that politicians are structurally in power in Westminster though. I mean, yeah, kind of by definition in a democracy the political classes are structurally in power.

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

#48

Post by cmh89 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #10
rightbyte wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that it boils down to insane requirements from the buyer and yes-men sellers. The technical problem is wanting one end-all goto system instead of like 20 different utilities I guess.

I haven't been on projects of this size, but with many of our customers a big issue is that the decisions are taken by people sufficiently high up in the organization that they don't know what's really going on, and without including key resources from lower levels to provide that insight. In my experience it only takes one or two levels to get to that point. Regarding the insane requirements, it's also my experience…

> haven't been on projects of this size, but with many of our customers a big issue is that the decisions are taken by people sufficiently high up in the organization that they don't know what's really going on, and without including key resources from lower levels to provide that insight.

This is my experience working in government IT. The people whose job it is to go to meetings and talk end up being the ones representing the businesses interest and the vendor ends up running circles around them because they aren't in any way qualified to talk about something technical.

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

#50

Post by nradov »

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…

And over time that custom software would inevitably expand to be as large and complex as Oracle ERP, but lower quality. As bad as some vendors are, organizations that lack a core competency in software development are even worse.
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