Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster
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Birmingham has the biggest city council in Europe, is the UK's second biggest city and has a White minority. The city has just declared bankruptcy, effectively, in considerable part due to a failed £100 Million ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) project.
https://www.cxtoday.com/data-analytics/the-story-of-birmingham-city-councils-disastrous-erp-rollout/
Can you imagine Free Software project being given £100 Million like that and what it could have achieved?
Think what sort of services you might have been able to deliver with £100 Million using Cloudron.
It is outrageous that this happened.
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Agreed - outrageous.
Failure of public service procurement, public service management, and allegedly IT "professionals". -
The article mentions that one place they may have gone wrong is in deciding to adapt rather than adopt Oracles ERP.
That funding could have gone to a Free Software ERP project. Think how much development work could have happened on Dolibarr or Odoo Community Edition with half of that. Every city in the world could have used it free of charge after project was complete.
Here is another way to look at it: We give nebulon and girish each £1 million, to gain their attentionk and then tell them that they can each have a further £3 million for a satisfactory ERP system, then £1 million more for some ongoing support. Think how amazing that system would be!
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Holy
Jersey has a similar issue. Something like £100m+ on a new SAP project that's not materialising. Only 100,000ish people here, too. The mind boggles.
This was from a couple of years ago, and still seems to be "in progress"
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/cost-major-government-it-project-more-doubles/
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@LoudLemur It's the diseconomies of scale in centralisation. ERP really isn't that complicated. It's the change management that has failed.
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COuldn't tell you if true, but this is what the algo served me:
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@micmc Corruption is exchanging influence for money or valuable benefits. That doesn't worry me, mostly just people trying to get by or get the most from their employer. It's apathy, distraction, and unaccountable unproductive werk that is the enemy of prosperity.
A more actionable concern is encouraging personal agency. All really just symptoms of an aging population, combined with this generation being the first to find out what it's like to have been sold and indebted by the previous, near or now retired.
IMHO higher interest rates and inflation will be here for years, it's the only way to erode debts and move value from old to working aged.
Only thing you can really do is make sure you're worth double the average in any way possible, that'll be about the equivalent of pre-debt living standards and affordability.
Or something like that
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@marcusquinn said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
apathy, distraction, and unaccountable unproductive werk
probably a good description of a huge number of of civil servants at both local and central government
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@timconsidine I'm a natural empathist, and always think that everyone needs and serves a purpose, so try to look at it without judgement, as everyone is someone's baby and hope. So, being pragmatic about cultural differences, since each has strengths and weaknesses, let's look at it in objectively.
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I suspect that government project sizes and budgets attract predatory sales, contracting, and shenanigans tactics.
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Bankruptcy protection is a sensible stop and renegotiation tool, which seems to be being used correctly in this case.
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Hard reality is technology makes people redundant in many roles that existed before it. Society still hasn't figured out a way to acceptably have less people working, without resentment.
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Manual worker percentages have fallen, but the needs for buildings have risen, admin staffing should be earning less, if they can't build physical things.
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Diseconomies of scale are real, subdivision protects from this. The UK is actually very good at this, for example the Colleges of big Universities protect from any central authority capturing unchecked control.
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American capitalism; growth at all costs, and externalise costs. The world has been sold America's negative externalities, due to submissive acceptance of financial hyper-scaling brand tactics for technical lock-ins. Here is where open-source can be a remedy, but it requires unwavering policy and law to direct such spending, difficult against the financial might of lobbying, but not impossible.
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Blame solves nothing, but problems need to be fed back to their creator's. Bankruptcy also does this. Smart move again.
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If you are abused, often the only solution is to draw attention to it. Bankruptcy also does this.
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Accountability is a tough one, as the very mechanisms of bureaucracy are the distribution of blame, if that is taken a step further into open-source policy & procedures documentation, then it becomes the world's problem available to those best able to solve.
I could probably go on, but gotta be productive to not also be more consumer than producer
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@marcusquinn said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
COuldn't tell you if true, but this is what the algo served me:
Allow me to suggest not sharing questionable content the algo serves you without checking it out a bit beforehand.
I just watched a bit of this and it called Bimingham City Council woke and it's basically blaming everything on Net Zero plans and people not paying Clean Air Fines (which it is obviously against).
Climate change denying/ anti doing anything about climate change bollocks, basically.
Relevant context:
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@timconsidine said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
@marcusquinn said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
apathy, distraction, and unaccountable unproductive werk
probably a good description of a huge number of of civil servants at both local and central government
And all the Bullshit Jobs in the private sector too. The public sector is in no way the only place where such stuff happens.
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@jdaviescoates said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
The public sector is in no way the only place where such stuff happens.
Indeed that's true.
Just less places to hide in the private sector ! -
@jdaviescoates Thankfully healthy debate benefits from knowing all sides of arguments, agreeable or not, and pressure groups as a proxy for censorship don't enhance debate, that needs a broad discover of all viewpoints, right, wrong, or unsubstantiated. Nannying viewing just dumbs down critical thinking.
In the subject of the algo, hopefully those that care most about protecting from that will be using privacy browsers, extensions, and not logged-in browsing. That's beyond my scope to consider, but I do recommend people take their own protection measures from algos, if they feel they distort their reality.
My interests in the environment are on pollution. What happens with climate, I feel is largely beyond controls of world police, and individuals should be prepared to adapt or migrate, and not hope for policy and centralised spending saviours.
Spicy thread, very much respect your work and beliefs, and support those that I can
️Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@marcusquinn said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
Nannying viewing just dumbs down critical thinking.
IMHO "critical ignoring", not a false balance that considers obvious bollocks worthy of consideration is a very valuable and underutilized skill in these strange times where people purposefully "flood the zone with shit"
See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121570
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@jdaviescoates Isn't it odd!?! I thought my education was ordinary, being all free, but it blows my mind that I assumed all were taught these things, but it seems rarer than it should be. Some of the most successful people I know have a mental crash if presented with both sides of an argument. Free speech = free mind!
Absolutely agree on that volume of information is both a tool for manipulation, and hazard to be mindful of, especially for kids craving learning. Just like food, we need enough, but not so much we are bloated and slow.
I'm pragmatic about failure, though. Birmingham will survive, and thrive. It's already made huge progress since I was a student there. Sometimes we have to zoom-out, and remember that whatever doesn't break you, makes you stronger.
I feel it might be the IT providers that have found they haven't solved the problems they professed to. Oracle is a significant open-source contributor, so perhaps on this occasion they simply underperformed their change-management role, with out dated concepts that didn't take account of the changes in the workforce expectations for their tools.
As they say; I owe you £100 - poor me, I owe you £100m - poor you.
Luckily, I think we have so many more solutions to come with AI upskilling every generation, in the same way GPS improves everyone's (with tech) navigation skills, for a diminishing cost as a percentage of income.
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@marcusquinn said in Birmingham City Council £100 Million IT ERP Project Disaster:
As they say; I owe you £100 - poor me, I owe you £100m - poor you.
Haha! Good one!
They are saying they went astray by "adapting" rather than "adopting" the software. In Odoo circles, it is quite widely accepted that once you start customizing their ERP, things start going downhill. The council could perhaps have dangled some money in front of Oracle first and said, we are interested in awarding a very, very big contract. We aren't going to do anything with you though, till these changes are made in advance. It might not work, but then again, it might.
The training was also used as an excuse for failure. Well instead setup online training and credentialling in advance (Cloudron/Moodle) (or use Oracle's existing online training) and then for every member of staff who gains the credential, pay them a small lump sum, since they now have new skills. There would be incentive to learn.
Thanks to everybody who has participated in the thread so far. It has all been interesting for me. I think taking a holistic approach and hearing views from different perspectives is usually the best way to fully understand something.
Regarding algorithm information, I like to try different websites to escape that, e.g. gab.com, bitchute.com, odysee.com, RT.com. They all have different algorithms. RT think that the council won't need to fund libraries, parks or road maintenance.
In PM's Question Time today, there was just one short question on Birmingham. I was amazed.
Who is expected to bail out Birmingham? Is your council stepping forward to volunteer to do that?
This sort of thing is fracturing the country and it could eventually lead to chaos and anarchy, or troubles like in Northern Ireland. In Glasgow, there are rats the size of small dogs and bin men won't empty bins because of the danger. Rubbish collection is apparently last on the list for Birmingham.
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@LoudLemur I don't need to know the organisation to know what happened: Apathy!
There's no excuse for any migration to take longer than 5 years if Tesla can build factories in months.
As long as pay is not directly and reversibly linked to results, then it is profitable to take as long as possible.
Yeah, assured mutual annihilation also works
For a long time I've believe that everyone should pay for their own software at work, that would soon open people's eyes to the costs of lock-ins.
Honestly, doesn't worry me. It's just systems self-healing. You wouldn't call a server failing when you have to reboot it occasionally to run all checks and cleanups on the way back up.
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This dude's commentary is pretty decent:
