It seems to me that most city councils will operate similar services and therefore have similar needs from their software. Therefore it doesn't make sense for each council to buy and customize their own system. Even better, they could co-fund an open source tool that can be used by all. I realize it's a simplistic view but it seems like there is a lot of money to be saved.
Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 softwar…
> that's not actually it's mission.
Its mission is to deliver council services, but if the best way to do that is through efficient IT (and in this day and age that's pretty undoubtedly the case, since most communications are pushed via websites, payments are made via automated systems, etc etc), then the organization should definitely pack the necessary skills and organizational tools to achieve efficient IT first and foremost.
> I don't actually want my city government to be a "software-making organization that delivers government services".
Let me understand this.
You want your city government to overcharge you on Council Tax because they didn't see the form you filed two months ago about being a single occupant.
You want your city government to miss your bin because they actually performed the collection one day earlier than usual and didn't alert you in some way.
You want your city government to be at the mercy of unfaithful civil servants who abscond with money by applying dodgy accounting.
You want your city government to dig themselves into massive financial holes because their planning and forecasting software is subpar.
You want your city government to be unable to analize expenses and contracts to identify where they're getting gouged.
You want your city government to ignore complaints about this or that item, since they can conveniently forget to file them when people call.
These (and more) are not hypotheticals - this is what goes on in many (most?) local authorities, today like yesterday, and it's all stuff that can be fixed with software by organizations with the right skills and attitudes; but they require putting software (and people who know how to make software) at the heart of "how we go about doing things".
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#93Earlier 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.
Not in the way that we have in the UK - where most representatives (regardless of party) have gone through the same schools and the same social circles (bit of journalism, bit of finance, all largely in London or surrounding areas).
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#94Earlier 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…
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.
Say you are an ERP vendor who really wants to get a contract with the (imaginary) Penzance Metropolitan Borough. What do you do? You identify the key decision makers and start wining and dining them. Since scrutiny at local level has largely disappeared (thanks to the demise of local press), nobody will notice.
Maybe you don't even need to do that, maybe you already knew them from school, so it was a given that they'd call you as soon as they got in a position to bring you in - and you'll be so grateful, you'll probably let you stay at your cottage in France for free, any time they want.
Etc etc etc.
This is stuff that in other countries would be called organised crime, mafia, defrauding the state, and so on. In Britain it's just how the ruling classes go about business.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 softwar…
> that's not actually it's mission. Its mission is to deliver council services, but if the best way to do that is through efficient IT (and in this day and age that's pretty undoubtedly the case, since most communications are pushed via websites, payments are made via automated systems, etc etc), then the organization should definitely pack the necessary skills and organizational tools to achieve efficient IT first a…
I don't live in a country where it's called a "Council" and operates like a UK local Council, so my units of city government and their roles/functions might not be the same, and that may be a misconnect in this conversation.
But services provided by IT are only one part of what I expect my local municipal government to be able to do competently, and not necessarily the great part. While I would like the services provided by IT to be done competently (ideally beyond competently), it does not necessarily follow that they should be focused on to the exclusion or de-prioritization of things that are not IT, which it seems to me would be the consequence of the local municipal government reorganizing itself and considering itself as fundamentally and mainly a software engineering organization (or an IT organization in general, which is not necessarily the same thing either).
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#96Birmingham Council has always been effective at wasting money.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#97Overpromise, 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.
Oracle is not a red herring. These are just Oracle's "implementation partners." They're all in on the take.