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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

#61

Post by sonotathrowaway »

rqtwteye wrote: post #58
namdnay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, with these types of project, 20% of the error is on useless partners, 80% on useless clients, who have no knowledge of how their current system works, are not willing to compromise on any existing features (because it's always easier to say "no" than to try and convince others to say "yes"), and don't really care about the migration one way or the other, because they weren't really asked in the firs…

“ 80% on useless clients, who have no knowledge of how their current system works,” I tend to think that’s true. I have been involved in some process improvements at my company and it was almost always that: * Nobody really knows how things are working now * A lot of people don’t want to adapt to new processes * Execs give you a lot of verbal commitment but don’t do anything to really help It’s really hard to impleme…

I wasn’t aware of how true this is until I got to see larger companies up close.

People are incredibly siloed and very incentivized to make the issue someone else’s problem - if you have a vendor you can shift the problem onto, even better.

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

#62

Post by bandrami »

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…

The problem is if you knew enough about your business logic to plan out an ERP system beforehand, you wouldn't need an ERP system to begin with. The main benefit of either buying or building an ERP system is that it forces you to actually find out (or decide) what the flow of information in your organization is. It's a management consulting process that happens to play out in software.

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

#63

Post by jsty »

kodah wrote: post #14
jrochkind1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the right question that gets at the heart of the ERP mess, but it doens't have a great answer. In theory, you should be able to have your software support the workflow that works for your specific organization, business, and context. Rather than having to change your workflow to what the machine demands as universal. The latter seems really inhumane. In practice, it never seems to work out very well. D…

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.

Building internal replacements for the subset of functionality you use would be less than half the battle.

Convincing your auditors that those systems were representing your financial position correctly would be hell on earth. Like them or not, auditors know SAP, Oracle and the like - and have well-defined processes & experts to certify them.

There's large amounts of risk and cost on both sides of the equation.

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

#64

Post by mistrial9 »

cmh89 wrote: post #48
magicalhippo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repre…

several valid viewpoints in this thread, describing portions of a difficult-to-describe situation. The word "qualified" jumps out for me here.. It could mean things like "sufficient technical background" and "of sound mind and problem solving skills" .. but in the govt context, "qualified" means exactly "you have legal permission" .. this is one of the several places that these projects break down, exactly. Those in business and those delivering permits, over time, learn that permits can be used to make money, and control future money, not work. The permit process for qualification also works at the bidding stage, where new entries are required to have their high school gradepoint checked, and hundred page report(s) to show "context" for the bid, yet existing payment contracts continue on in zombie mode for huge values, on a regular basis. This is like the force of gravity for these deals.. both sides, govt and big business, want lots of cash flow and no end in sight.

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

#65

Post by arethuza »

pelorat wrote: post #39
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.

No one living here considers Turkey to be part of Europe

Istanbul is partly in Europe?

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

#66

Post by notdang »

rightbyte wrote: post #6
MayeulC wrote: post #2

Is that an example of the sunk cost fallacy, or corruption/lobbying?

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.

They changed from SAP ERP to Oracle ERP. There were no 20 different utilities to begin with.

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

#67

Post by kurthr »

revelio wrote: post #47
laputan_machine wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know so little about British politics that I take Yes, (Prime) Minister at face value. I would have thought it war more about the (benefits and) interests of bureaucracy and civil service.

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

#68

Post by drumhead »

If it's not a fail with Oracle, it's SAP or dynamics or some other "ERP". Do these implementations ever work, and why do these big organisations keep going for them?surely they've seen the string of failures preceding them? I suspect it's ego, and the need to pad CVs that does it. And the unwillingness of the people who should know better to say no.

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

#69

Post by rossdavidh »

drumhead wrote: post #68

If it's not a fail with Oracle, it's SAP or dynamics or some other "ERP". Do these implementations ever work, and why do these big organisations keep going for them?surely they've seen the string of failures preceding them? I suspect it's ego, and the need to pad CVs that does it. And the unwillingness of the people who should know better to say no.

They "work" just fine for Oracle, SAP, etc.

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

#70

Post by rossdavidh »

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.

Well I suppose it's relevant in two ways:

1) this is a huge bill, but it is relevant that it is a bill for a large city council (as opposed to a village facing the same bill)

2) they are big enough they should not really be considered as too small to afford good counsel on how to do this sort of project properly

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