Oracle finance system at Europe's largest city council still falls short 2.5 years later
- Reference: 1738148589
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/29/birmingham_oracle/
- Source link:
The cloud-based Fusion system went live in April 2022, before Birmingham City Council had fully resolved the design of the solution, said auditors Grant Thornton, which has not received financial statements for the two most recent years because of problems with the ledger implementation.
Birmingham City Council is responsible for a budget of around £3.2 billion ($3.98 billion), which covers spending on social care, schools, refuse collection, and other services. In three reports set to be presented to the council's Audit Committee on Wednesday, the auditors relayed a litany of failures during the vital software project.
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As The Register has already [2]reported , the project to replace an aging SAP system began in October 2019 with an expected budget of £19 million ($23.6 million) and go-live dates of December 2020 and February 2021. Auditors now say the costs may be as much as £130 million ($161 million), and although the new software went live in April 2022, the council is "unlikely to have a fully functioning finance system until at least 2026."
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The auditors first set the deadline for the system to be made "safe and compliant" regarding accounting and reporting [5]in October 2023 . As of November 2024, the council had still not achieved this goal, the latest reports said.
However, the decision to go live and the culture and governance surrounding the project will concern both taxpayers and critics of IT project failures.
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Remarkably, the auditors found that the design of the Oracle solution created by the council, the vendors, and its partners "was not fully resolved when the system went live."
Meanwhile, the council authorized the go-live when "there were known deficiencies in the design and functional effectiveness of the system that required correction," they said.
Problems also permeated organizational culture. The auditors said council leadership was guilty of not wanting to hear "bad news."
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"This culture significantly undermined the effectiveness of the risk management process," the auditors said.
Speaking to council staff, the Grant Thornton team also found that, in terms of program governance, there was little or no independent assurance, ownership by senior officers, oversight by council members, or a strong design authority.
[8]Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate
[9]Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever
[10]Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year
[11]City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
There was also "a lack of transparent reporting with evidence that known weaknesses were not reported to key decision-making groups" and the authority was overly dependent on outside contractors. "The council did not equip itself with sufficient in-house skills, capacity and experience in key program management roles," it said.
As with many IT project failures, the council did not sufficiently work with those who would end up using the system before the project started and as it got going. "There was a lack of effective and timely engagement with the operational teams who would be the end users, in the design and business change process," the auditors found.
Lastly, the top-level managers in the council were faced with juggling a number of priorities, including a certain level of self-interest.
"Senior officers with responsibility for the safe delivery of the program faced conflicting priorities to keep to budget, avoid further delay, and protect reputations," Grant Thornton said.
Both Oracle and Birmingham City Council have been asked to comment on the report.
In September 2023, [12]Birmingham City Council became effectively bankrupt owing to a combination of its outstanding equal pay liabilities and the cost of the Oracle project failure.
In April last year, [13]it emerged that the council did not have an audit trail in the accounting system for nearly 18 months , meaning that from April 2022 until August or September 2023, it was unable to say whether any financial fraud has taken place using the system. ®
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[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/birmingham_oracle_cost/
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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/06/birmingham_erp_budget/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/08/birmingham_oracle_erp_rollout/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/20/birmingham_oracle_finance_woes/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/birmingham_oracle_cost/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/birmingham_city_council_oracle/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/25/birmingham_oracle_audit_trail/
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
If only there where someone who could have predicted this...
Some kind of prophet or oracle or something...
Re: If only there where someone who could have predicted this...
That SAPed my will to live...
Shocker
Shocker.. Oracle installation goes way over budget, is late and doesn't work. Must be a first.
" Lastly, the top-level managers in the council were faced with juggling a number of priorities, including a certain level of self-interest. "
I know this is evident in the way BCC appointed an Oracle expert in order to review the project to see whether it should be torn up and a new path taken - who then amazingly said BCC should stick with the Oracle implementation - but this part needs further investigation and talking about. This is corruption, and is more than just a throw away line at the end of an article.
What utter, utter bastards BCC are. And we're all suffering because of their fetish for brown envelopes.
"And we're all suffering because of their fetish for brown envelopes."
At the moment it's only Birmingham council tax payers (plus any employees made redundant) will suffer, as there's no government bailout.
Everyone involved...
...should be fired, banned from local government, surcharged to pay back some of the money they have lost and investigated by the old bill. Including Oracle. None of this will happen.
We need to use less tech, simpler tech (and more reliable/secure/offline tech) to avoid this sort of thing in future. We won't.
When tech costs this much and fails this badly, it is a problem not a solution.
By the time they get it working, if they ever do, they will need a replacement, as component parts of it will be EOL'd. I dare say they will run with Oracle for that too!
PMO & cowardice
I can guarantee this was promises made & then refusing to go to the customer and say "we can't di this" & "if you want it, it'll add 6 months to the project "
The number of projects where either cowardice of explaining stuff upwards has kiboshed it or an arrogant PMO who insist on over riding the SMEs on something which then snowballs into a total fuck storm
Sauce for the goose...
The Govt is planning on letting the DWP dip into people's bank accounts without their consent, to recover overpaid benefits.
How about applying the same principle at executive level: sequestration of bonuses, pensions etc?
Projected cost: £130million. Number of residents under BCC remit: close to 1.2 million. Cost per resident to get his far: £108 per person .
For a project designed to help them figure out how and where to spend money, it's become wonderfully self-serving.
The mind boggles. Best of all, I'll wager no one gets to be held accountable (see what I did there?) because that could well question the entire structure local governance relies on.
" I'll wager no one gets to be held accountable (see what I did there?) "
Well yeah, because we don't work for BCC.
I often wonder if an off the shelf trusted and established application, with internal support staff can create a better and MORE FLEXIBLE service. My experience ends in 1997 when the benefit agency brought in consultants to look at the IT services, and they scrapped in house solutions and contracted out. The results were as you would expect. I remember we could not ask for bugs to be fixed because it had been signed off and we could only make a handful of “feature requests” per year
To paraphrase "Peopleware"
It's 2025 and someone, is fu**ing up another accounts application. Bearing in mind that accounts packages were just about the first ever commercial application sold on computers to paying customers.
You hire an Oracle person and WTF did you think they would recommend?
and
""Senior officers with responsibility for the safe delivery of the program faced conflicting priorities to keep to budget, avoid further delay, and protect reputations,""
3 guesses which of these that motherf**ker chose to prioritise.
"Reputation"? Theirs went down the shi**er when it became over 1 year late.
Note how the end users are vigorously kept out of the loop. Heaven forbid they might know things that might make the implementation effective.
"the project to replace an aging SAP system"
What's worse, an ageing system or a shiny new one that doesn't work?