Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 97 posts

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

#81

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

SAP S4/HANA was insanely expensive but generally worked, and on time.

Finding consultants who could help was like pulling teeth, though. The offshored Indian ones were terrible, and the European ones often didn't speak English well enough. Mexico City was had good offshoring options but couldn't supply enough bodies.

Never had a strictly Oracle project go well though. Exadata is a dirty word in these parts. Only thing that was more of a PITA was Azure...

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

#82

Post by red-iron-pine »

FredPret wrote: post #17
phkahler wrote: post #4

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

Former ERP consultant here. There are infinite ways to do business: different perspectives to take on the same situation, different deal structures, different data sources, reporting, etc. You can run your business / org exactly as the ERP designers envisioned, but that means you'll have to adapt to your ERP, which is wrong-headed and certainly much more expensive in a large org. Even the most vanilla implementation…

> You can run your business / org exactly as the ERP designers envisioned, but that means you'll have to adapt to your ERP, which is wrong-headed and certainly much more expensive in a large org.

Bingo. I'm not going to tell my CEO to change how they run the business just to conform to how the lowest-bidder ERP decides I should do things.

Unless it's ServiceNow, for some reason.

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

#83

Post by red-iron-pine »

denton-scratch wrote: post #45
stareatgoats wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then Birmingham City Council doesn't need to use those modules.

But they may have specific municipal / local / state / national rules to comply with in ways that commercial entities do not.

These differences imply customizations.

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

#84

Post by rhaway84773 »

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.

If you built a team that was good enough to build a custom ERP for your municipality, you’ve built an ERP company.

At that point you’d might as well compete with the likes of Oracle/SAP yourself, or the employees themselves will probably start their own startup to do so.

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

#85

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

> The technical problem is wanting one end-all goto system instead of like 20 different utilities I guess.

At some point these systems have to share info, dump info somewhere (data lake, backups, whatever), and output info.

Inevitably there will be one or two systems that connect them.

Plus the overhead of dealing with 20+ different vendors, systems, updates, vulnerabilities, interconnections, etc. is a nightmare. There is a point where a "single source of truth" is too much effort and too expensive, but a clusterufck of different systems is not a great solution.

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

#86

Post by jrochkind1 »

toyg wrote: post #51
jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To do it in-house succesfully requires a level of healthy functioning [...] that few organizations have I think it actually requires the organization to morph into being a tech company first. In order to have good software to run a City Council, it effectively requires the Council to become "a software-making organization that delivers council services". In order to have good software to run a bank, it requires the…

I mean, not only is it politically difficult, it's probably not appropriate for a City Government to organize itself primarily as a "software organization" -- that's not actually it's mission.

I don't actually want my city government to be a "software-making organization that delivers government services".

Every organization needs an ERP (maybe?), but not every organization that needs an ERP is or should be a software organization. Saying that in order to get a good ERP every organization has to transform itself into a software-centered organization... seems a bit much.

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

#87

Post by vladharbuz »

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…

Could you say a bit more about how those running the councils benefit from these contracts? I don’t think I fully understood what you were saying about kickbacks.

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

#88

Post by jrochkind1 »

candiodari wrote: post #33
jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Hm, your direction of comparison between "100K" and "a team of 5 SWE's" seems off. Also, you're going to need some non-SWE staff involved there, some combination of people providing product management, project management, UX design, and user research/contact.

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

#89

Post by kwere »

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.

Labours today are literally red tories

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

#90

Post by peapicker »

taylodl wrote: post #77

Overpromise, underdeliver, and overcharge. It's the Oracle Way. In my experience, Oracle only ever built one product that was good, and you can replace it with PostgreSQL for significantly less money and gain greater flexibility to boot. I think the source of Oracle's execution woes lies in part with their Fusion Middleware. It's garbage. Even though JEE has become somewhat outdated, it's still viable. That isn't the…

EY was the implementation partner, Oracle the vendor. The article doesn't make that clear, but a linked one does. PWC and KPMG were brought in to try and fix after EY failed at additional cost. All three are known for putting brain or three and a bunch of new hires at top rates on projects. Oracle is a red herring here.
Post reply on HN