City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Post by Shorn » Tue, Nov 05, 2024, 4:01 AM UTC

physicsguy wrote: post #2

Any 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.

Used to work for a large airline IT provider on departure-control software (check-in, boarding, etc.)

Each airline on-boarded would demand mandatory features that they couldn't do without. Keep in mind these features weren't free, they were billed market-rate development charges - though the company didn't make money off that, the core business model was usage-based billing.

More than 80% of implemented features would go completely unused.

Post by creesch » Tue, Nov 05, 2024, 7:43 AM UTC

dole wrote: post #19

creesch wrote: post #5

Replacing 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.

It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles and "Oracle" is taking the brunt of the blame, much like "Ticketmaster" doesn't care if you don't like them or not, you're going to use them. It's not just Oracle's fault for a 200m pound invoice, and I agree jumping from SAP to Oracle is probably one reason why the customization costs that much more tha…

> It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles

It certainly is, here in the Netherlands consultancy companies are often directly mentioned as a cause for a lot similar projects going over budget. Though the government really doesn't seem to be able to do much about it or simply doesn't care. As most recently they appointed the ex vice-president of one of those companies as a state secretary of Digitalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsolt_Szab%C3%B3_(Dutch_politi...

Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Re: City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle