The problems and costs encountered by the bankrupt Birmingham City Council has caused them to act in hindsight and cancel the reintroduction of its yet to emerge as a viable alternative to off the shelf packages for IT services.
Birmingham fell into the trap of trying a one size fits all system via ORACLE, the costs spiralled following a damaging equal value claim by workers that dragged into the position it finds itself in today.
The TIMES reports, Birmingham City Council has spent more than £2.5m hiring staff to manually fix errors caused by a failed Oracle accounting system, with nearly 100,000 hours logged since 2023. The IT rollout, launched in 2022, spiralled from a £19m upgrade to an estimated £170m including ongoing costs.
Financial data became unreliable, suppliers went unpaid, and more than £30m in council tax and business rates were written off. Auditors blamed excessive system customisation and weak oversight, calling the failure unprecedented.
The problems compounded existing pressures from equal pay liabilities and followed a bin strike that highlighted wider operational strain. The council has delayed relaunching the Oracle system until later in 2026.
Other Councils including the reported by experts as being completely dysfunctional, Northumberland County Council, who in layman's parlance ‘doesn’t know its arse from its elbow’ appears to be locked into Oracle Cloud to manage its business suite and public face whilst developing a stare into the future with Oracle's fusion cloud and AI system.
Northumberland’s departmental heads may have chosen a better bypass route to satisfy its democratically elected one party cabinet members than Birmingham, as they have chosen their own systems to run alongside the Council’s one party cabinet system’s wish to develop business cases for everything and nothing with costs running through the roof for that development and no system to curb borrowing at very high rates when compared to clear thinking financially aligned councils who make decisions to support localism over business.
Let's take a simple example. The social services department at Northumberland County Council chose Liquidamber via a business case to its one party cabinet to run its systems as a stand alone system. To get information required by a wider council departmental structure links with other systems were developed and that integration has been blamed internally (according to workers in that field) for the ever present annual hard to locate overspends being made by social services.
With Northumberland never undertaking scrutiny that includes information required to scope in change, mainly sticking with Post Decision scrutiny instead of the widely accepted in Local Government Pre-Decision making scrutiny which would define local people's needs for any decision before its taken, which the majority of high performing Councils rely upon, such as league tables, national and local performance data leaves Councillors outside the cabinet, local businesses, families and other Council departments struggling to understand why their Council rarely improves.
On the other hand smaller Councils using SAP systems seem to be able to share information between departments much more easily than giant monoliths like Birmingham and Northumberland.
SAP (Systems, Applications, & Products in Data Processing) computer systems are the world's leading, highly configurable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, integrating business functions like finance, HR, supply chain, and manufacturing into a single, real-time data platform. Essential for Councillors who need to share what's happening on the ground with their electorate.
It's great to go modern sometimes but in the eyes of people who want to know what their Council is doing for them, the SAPS have it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/opinion_piece/
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