City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
theregister.com
City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#2Any IT transformation project like this is always hampered by people wanting customisations. Those customisations are usually to support Janet in office A who demands that she damn well isn't going to make changes to her workflow that she's done since she started in 1995.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#3I feel like the title could use the name of the city involved (Birmingham, UK)
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#4I think the Uk could show some gusto here and implement these systems in-house and open sourced. There’s nothing innovative or unsolved in this domain.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#5Replacing SAP for Oracle to me feels like replacing one evil for another.
Besides the companies themselves constantly upselling you and having idiotic licensing terms. Both are very much the sort of companies with products you only are "able" to implement with extremely expensive outside consultants.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#6I think the Uk could show some gusto here and implement these systems in-house and open sourced. There’s nothing innovative or unsolved in this domain.
Too much to build. UK government has shown it can build styling templates, payment and notification wrappers well. These are useful and achievable services.
Full on ERP would be a disaster.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#7> It is set to re-implement an "out of the box" version of the solution after customizations in the first effort disrupted its bank reconciliation system.
Root cause.
When you buy from an ERP vendor, you are not just buying software, you are buying a logical model of an idealized corporation. If that model doesn't reflect your actual organization, you can try to customize the software, but beyond some threshold of mismatch, it's easier to change your accounting & control & governance processes to match the software.
SAP and Oracle are no different in this respect.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#8I think the Uk could show some gusto here and implement these systems in-house and open sourced. There’s nothing innovative or unsolved in this domain.
The system is working as intended to those that matter.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#9> It is set to re-implement an "out of the box" version of the solution after customizations in the first effort disrupted its bank reconciliation system. Root cause. When you buy from an ERP vendor, you are not just buying software, you are buying a logical model of an idealized corporation. If that model doesn't reflect your actual organization, you can try to customize the software, but beyond some threshold of mi…
Tax agencies might be the way to hammer this into organizations. If they demanded specific sorts of data for specific activities for audits everything else would quickly evolve to support that.
Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
#10> It is set to re-implement an "out of the box" version of the solution after customizations in the first effort disrupted its bank reconciliation system. Root cause. When you buy from an ERP vendor, you are not just buying software, you are buying a logical model of an idealized corporation. If that model doesn't reflect your actual organization, you can try to customize the software, but beyond some threshold of mi…
Also this goes beyond just ERP - core banking packages like Temenos or Avaloq are the same. They have something called 'model bank' which is some default simple model of common expected behaviors, workflows etc.
But almost none of the banks actually work like that, apart form some small insignificant shops which can't afford such customization. Each has some unique stuff that makes it better than most competition in that area. Behemoths of banking world run their pretty unique things, workflows, specific jurisdiction reporting etc. so each of them have more or less massive customization on top of basic common stuff.
I guess it goes without saying almost constant flow of changes, either from business or regulators keeps hefty IT teams busy to maintain that customization and ensure things keep working. Also logically the complexity has only one direction to go, and so it goes, slowly but surely.
I am not even sure if business properly realizes all this, maybe they do or maybe they are kept in continuous cloud of bullshit from IT managers who of course want to preserve their jobs and importance (headcount, impact) within corporation. Anyway the prospect of migration to something else is something they (rightly) detest and want to avoid if possible, since costs and duration are massive, potential issues tremendous and backbreaking, and there is absolutely no guarantee of success.