Wouldn't this be more of an issue with contract mismanagement? They're not buying off the shelf software with their credit cards and then finding that it doesn't work. These are purpose-built...
Wouldn't this be more of an issue with contract mismanagement? They're not buying off the shelf software with their credit cards and then finding that it doesn't work. These are purpose-built solutions. They are typically a "statement of work" that goes out to bid. So either someone submitted an SOW that didn't sufficiently spell out the requirements that must be met before the vendor fulfills it, or someone signed off on a contract payment too early.
I worked in Local Government years ago in the UK, the amount of "Just get it fucking done!" by local councillors who don't understand what they're talking about is insane. There's so many...
I worked in Local Government years ago in the UK, the amount of "Just get it fucking done!" by local councillors who don't understand what they're talking about is insane.
There's so many 'gentleman's agreements' that go on in local government that it makes your head spin, especially when things happen that go directly AGAINST policy that those individuals have created. Everything from waste sites and grass cutting to transformation and software... there's a councillor somewhere who thinks they know more than the experts because they were 'voted' into their place, not just earnt it through a job interview.
I watched a councillor make demands on a Highways Department to go against the curve and refuse to give data to the Research & BI Team simply because it would could be used to make them look bad, rather than you know... planning adequate road maintanence. Six months it took to get that clown to shut his mouth. The same happens with software procurements.
The councillor will play it safe, "Oh, are you sure you've got the expertise in your department to handle this? Let's just call our local consultant in to do due dilligence for the taxpayer, you know?" - Said consultant-partner is KPMG / EY / BCG type who the councillor is on first name basis with and goes to golf with at the weekends. They'll say whatever it takes if it means ongoing profit, even if it makes zero sense.
So then technical teams get the recommendation to go with Oracle, not SAP. And if they challenge it? It gets political and they could lose their jobs the next time cuts come around... so what are you going to do?
I'm not saying that councils are corrupt, they're not. They're full of bright, intelligent, empathetic and caring people. But the councillors who get elected to 'run' them are as underhanded, vile and wretched as you can get and are high off the power that they think their position affords them (and don't get me started on the time the local UKIP councillor refused to acknowledge the Head of IT because of his turban...).
Due Dilligence is done internally. But the smart folks have all left to the private sector, those who are left get their jobs threatened (passively) if they don't do as they're told by a councillor who thinks he simply knows better / wants to feel smarter.
I don’t really feel like this article has much real information or even any kind of proposal and can almost be completely boiled down to “contractors should spend more time analyzing the...
I don’t really feel like this article has much real information or even any kind of proposal and can almost be completely boiled down to “contractors should spend more time analyzing the organizational structure of government clients when developing solutions for them because they often have very different needs than private for-profit businesses” which I feel like is pretty self-evident.
So maybe I was reading too much into it, but I almost saw a plea for an entrepreneur to develop a completely different software platform, designed from the start around the needs of government...
So maybe I was reading too much into it, but I almost saw a plea for an entrepreneur to develop a completely different software platform, designed from the start around the needs of government agencies and nonprofits. The argument seems to be that fitting a government agency into software designed for business is fitting a square peg into a round hole.
Oracle's repeated public sector failures prove a different approach is needed Mon 11 Sep 2023 // 08:31 UTC So as someone who has worked for nonprofits, this idea seems plausible. However I would...
Oracle's repeated public sector failures prove a different approach is needed
Mon 11 Sep 2023 // 08:31 UTC
OPINION Fill in the blank: "_______ project fails, costing millions." Five points if you chose "Government IT," five points for "Oracle," and a gold star if you had both.
That Oracle's local government ERP project for Birmingham City Council is now in nine-digit overrun and doesn't work is news because of its size and contribution to the council's bankruptcy, not because this has never happened before.
So as someone who has worked for nonprofits, this idea seems plausible. However I would love it if actual tech people would give an opinion.
It basically always boils down to this when it comes to commercial software. TBH the business sector also reels from these sorts of problems but its easier to sweep them under the rug. If the...
lots of basic functionality was missing from the platform, and what had been sold could not do the job.
It basically always boils down to this when it comes to commercial software. TBH the business sector also reels from these sorts of problems but its easier to sweep them under the rug. If the private sector spends $100 million dollars and it pulls in $101 million, its a net win and thus the waste doesn't matter. But if everyone else spends $100 million doing the same thing, they probably just spent $100 million with little else to show for it, because the thing they're spending money on doesn't impact revenue, only expenses.
Salespeople have a lot of incentive to misrepresent the capabilities of what they're selling. This is as true for traditional goods as it is for software... there's a reason Engineering hates Sales.
ERP systems in particular have a disastrous track record for overages. Because most ERP systems bring their benefit by breaking down business silos and re-evaluating business processes. These are two things that businesses generally hate doing in practice, and thus will generally do the bare minimum to facilitate the ERP migration, then followup with "how do I make the new system do what the old system did." And now you need custom development and start triggering massive overages.
Also its really, really, really hard to put a proper pricetag on "completely evaluate every one of your business processes and fix it."
And not-for-profit entities have another thing holding them back: They are not for-profit. And what I mean by that is: Their management is inundated from people from the for-profit sector. Everyone starts making assumptions about how things need to be run (because that's how it runs in the for-profit sector). And now they start trying to "keeping up with the Joneses" and run headlong into that aforementioned $100 million waste.
Absolutely. Process improvement has been the bane of my existence working in the nonprofit sector. Now that I work in the for-profit sector, I don't have to worry about it, but it was a core part...
Absolutely. Process improvement has been the bane of my existence working in the nonprofit sector. Now that I work in the for-profit sector, I don't have to worry about it, but it was a core part of my job at the first "big girl" NP job I had.
Maybe it varies by industry, by my experiences with not-for-profits in the do-gooder sectors of civil society and community development has been the opposite. The pay isn't great relative to the...
And not-for-profit entities have another thing holding them back: They are not for-profit. And what I mean by that is: Their management is inundated from people from the for-profit sector. Everyone starts making assumptions about how things need to be run (because that's how it runs in the for-profit sector). And now they start trying to "keeping up with the Joneses" and run headlong into that aforementioned $100 million waste.
Maybe it varies by industry, by my experiences with not-for-profits in the do-gooder sectors of civil society and community development has been the opposite. The pay isn't great relative to the skill sets required, so they tend to be loaded up with some combination of frustrated erstwhile academics with theoretical backgrounds but little practical experience (not even the kind you'd get from being a department head if you were on a tenure track because they were never able to get on that ladder). And then the lower and middle-management work tends to be overloaded with the sons and daughters of people in the foundation/donor class, or "kept spouses" of wealthy people because that's the only way you can live in a high-COL city despite the meagre compensation. Many of the ones who remain after a certain amount of tenure, I get the feeling, just couldn't hack it in a more competitive environment. And the ones who could tend to be extremely passionate about their work in a way that makes them kind of freaks, which is it's own sort of problem when it comes to maintaining healthy work boundaries for themselves and the teams they oversee.
As you go higher up you get more people with real experience, but it's often salesy type stuff from being an "ideas guy" that does not involve any real expertise about the field. So it's not even that they're from a "for profit" background, because such people flood for profit industries as well and they just as oblivious there.
There’s something more fundamental that baffles me here: going one link deeper, the original contract was for £20M to “replace SAP for core HR and finance functions”; they mention a little later...
There’s something more fundamental that baffles me here: going one link deeper, the original contract was for £20M to “replace SAP for core HR and finance functions”; they mention a little later that one of the reasons for the massive cost overruns (from £20M to £100M) were that it was having problems “tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well”. Obviously I’m extrapolating a lot from a few sentences, but doesn’t that sound… not enormously hard? Like, certainly not £20M hard.
I’d perhaps be more wary of underestimating the difficulty - and I know I still may well be doing exactly that - if I hadn’t watched the central government spend £35M on an app that I know for an absolute fact could have been built by ten people in the space of a few months for under £1M.
Obviously the overruns in Birmingham’s case are insane, but even at the original price that’s enough to hire 60 people, all on salaries that put them in the top 10% of the country, for five full years. Does it really take a team of 60 half a decade to figure out core HR and accounting? And if not, why was the original plan to pay that much to Oracle? For that matter, why is public money going towards building closed source software in the first place, when it could be improved and iterated far more cheaply by opening it up (and absolute credit where it’s due to gov.uk for doing exactly that with projects under their purview)?
It's a shame that people keep on talking about the Oracle issue in relation to Birmingham's bankruptcy, because it's only a small part of the problem, and I suspect not that different to a huge...
It's a shame that people keep on talking about the Oracle issue in relation to Birmingham's bankruptcy, because it's only a small part of the problem, and I suspect not that different to a huge number of similar public sector projects that quickly blow their budget. If that was the only issue, the council would be fine.
The bigger issue is that Birmingham City Council underpaid typically female jobs for decades, has paid almost £1.1bn in equal pay claims, and still has a £760m bill to pay, increasing by 14m every month. This blows the ~£100m Oracle bill out of the water.
I also want to add that this article makes a very poor case. Yes, I agree that government digital systems are going to be more complex than those of corporate entities, and I can see the argument that governments and councils therefore need to be more discerning about buying into projects like the Oracle one here. But fundamentally, Birmingham City Council has a payroll, and it needs to pay the people on that payroll, and it needs software to do that. The solution in the article seems to be to build a system that's... like a computer? It's difficult to even parse what that's meant to mean. Something distributed perhaps? Municipal authorities will be saved by microservices? Yeah, no.
Wouldn't this be more of an issue with contract mismanagement? They're not buying off the shelf software with their credit cards and then finding that it doesn't work. These are purpose-built solutions. They are typically a "statement of work" that goes out to bid. So either someone submitted an SOW that didn't sufficiently spell out the requirements that must be met before the vendor fulfills it, or someone signed off on a contract payment too early.
I worked in Local Government years ago in the UK, the amount of "Just get it fucking done!" by local councillors who don't understand what they're talking about is insane.
There's so many 'gentleman's agreements' that go on in local government that it makes your head spin, especially when things happen that go directly AGAINST policy that those individuals have created. Everything from waste sites and grass cutting to transformation and software... there's a councillor somewhere who thinks they know more than the experts because they were 'voted' into their place, not just earnt it through a job interview.
I watched a councillor make demands on a Highways Department to go against the curve and refuse to give data to the Research & BI Team simply because it would could be used to make them look bad, rather than you know... planning adequate road maintanence. Six months it took to get that clown to shut his mouth. The same happens with software procurements.
The councillor will play it safe, "Oh, are you sure you've got the expertise in your department to handle this? Let's just call our local consultant in to do due dilligence for the taxpayer, you know?" - Said consultant-partner is KPMG / EY / BCG type who the councillor is on first name basis with and goes to golf with at the weekends. They'll say whatever it takes if it means ongoing profit, even if it makes zero sense.
So then technical teams get the recommendation to go with Oracle, not SAP. And if they challenge it? It gets political and they could lose their jobs the next time cuts come around... so what are you going to do?
I'm not saying that councils are corrupt, they're not. They're full of bright, intelligent, empathetic and caring people. But the councillors who get elected to 'run' them are as underhanded, vile and wretched as you can get and are high off the power that they think their position affords them (and don't get me started on the time the local UKIP councillor refused to acknowledge the Head of IT because of his turban...).
Due Dilligence is done internally. But the smart folks have all left to the private sector, those who are left get their jobs threatened (passively) if they don't do as they're told by a councillor who thinks he simply knows better / wants to feel smarter.
Politicians abusing their power and ignoring experts?! Say it an't so!
Ha, ain't that the truth.
There's nothing more vicious and vile than local government electorates and elections in the UK.
I don’t really feel like this article has much real information or even any kind of proposal and can almost be completely boiled down to “contractors should spend more time analyzing the organizational structure of government clients when developing solutions for them because they often have very different needs than private for-profit businesses” which I feel like is pretty self-evident.
So maybe I was reading too much into it, but I almost saw a plea for an entrepreneur to develop a completely different software platform, designed from the start around the needs of government agencies and nonprofits. The argument seems to be that fitting a government agency into software designed for business is fitting a square peg into a round hole.
They could, if the government would pay for that, they pay for the lowest bidder. Also making one off software is a good way to get stuck in the past.
When your competition is Oracle, you have a lot of headroom.
Conversely, cornering a niche market with quality is a great way to make it.
Oracle's repeated public sector failures prove a different approach is needed
Mon 11 Sep 2023 // 08:31 UTC
So as someone who has worked for nonprofits, this idea seems plausible. However I would love it if actual tech people would give an opinion.
It basically always boils down to this when it comes to commercial software. TBH the business sector also reels from these sorts of problems but its easier to sweep them under the rug. If the private sector spends $100 million dollars and it pulls in $101 million, its a net win and thus the waste doesn't matter. But if everyone else spends $100 million doing the same thing, they probably just spent $100 million with little else to show for it, because the thing they're spending money on doesn't impact revenue, only expenses.
Salespeople have a lot of incentive to misrepresent the capabilities of what they're selling. This is as true for traditional goods as it is for software... there's a reason Engineering hates Sales.
ERP systems in particular have a disastrous track record for overages. Because most ERP systems bring their benefit by breaking down business silos and re-evaluating business processes. These are two things that businesses generally hate doing in practice, and thus will generally do the bare minimum to facilitate the ERP migration, then followup with "how do I make the new system do what the old system did." And now you need custom development and start triggering massive overages.
Also its really, really, really hard to put a proper pricetag on "completely evaluate every one of your business processes and fix it."
And not-for-profit entities have another thing holding them back: They are not for-profit. And what I mean by that is: Their management is inundated from people from the for-profit sector. Everyone starts making assumptions about how things need to be run (because that's how it runs in the for-profit sector). And now they start trying to "keeping up with the Joneses" and run headlong into that aforementioned $100 million waste.
Underrated comment right here. Process improvement and institutional resistance and profit motive are all working against a successful implementation.
Absolutely. Process improvement has been the bane of my existence working in the nonprofit sector. Now that I work in the for-profit sector, I don't have to worry about it, but it was a core part of my job at the first "big girl" NP job I had.
Maybe it varies by industry, by my experiences with not-for-profits in the do-gooder sectors of civil society and community development has been the opposite. The pay isn't great relative to the skill sets required, so they tend to be loaded up with some combination of frustrated erstwhile academics with theoretical backgrounds but little practical experience (not even the kind you'd get from being a department head if you were on a tenure track because they were never able to get on that ladder). And then the lower and middle-management work tends to be overloaded with the sons and daughters of people in the foundation/donor class, or "kept spouses" of wealthy people because that's the only way you can live in a high-COL city despite the meagre compensation. Many of the ones who remain after a certain amount of tenure, I get the feeling, just couldn't hack it in a more competitive environment. And the ones who could tend to be extremely passionate about their work in a way that makes them kind of freaks, which is it's own sort of problem when it comes to maintaining healthy work boundaries for themselves and the teams they oversee.
As you go higher up you get more people with real experience, but it's often salesy type stuff from being an "ideas guy" that does not involve any real expertise about the field. So it's not even that they're from a "for profit" background, because such people flood for profit industries as well and they just as oblivious there.
There’s something more fundamental that baffles me here: going one link deeper, the original contract was for £20M to “replace SAP for core HR and finance functions”; they mention a little later that one of the reasons for the massive cost overruns (from £20M to £100M) were that it was having problems “tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well”. Obviously I’m extrapolating a lot from a few sentences, but doesn’t that sound… not enormously hard? Like, certainly not £20M hard.
I’d perhaps be more wary of underestimating the difficulty - and I know I still may well be doing exactly that - if I hadn’t watched the central government spend £35M on an app that I know for an absolute fact could have been built by ten people in the space of a few months for under £1M.
Obviously the overruns in Birmingham’s case are insane, but even at the original price that’s enough to hire 60 people, all on salaries that put them in the top 10% of the country, for five full years. Does it really take a team of 60 half a decade to figure out core HR and accounting? And if not, why was the original plan to pay that much to Oracle? For that matter, why is public money going towards building closed source software in the first place, when it could be improved and iterated far more cheaply by opening it up (and absolute credit where it’s due to gov.uk for doing exactly that with projects under their purview)?
It's a shame that people keep on talking about the Oracle issue in relation to Birmingham's bankruptcy, because it's only a small part of the problem, and I suspect not that different to a huge number of similar public sector projects that quickly blow their budget. If that was the only issue, the council would be fine.
The bigger issue is that Birmingham City Council underpaid typically female jobs for decades, has paid almost £1.1bn in equal pay claims, and still has a £760m bill to pay, increasing by 14m every month. This blows the ~£100m Oracle bill out of the water.
I also want to add that this article makes a very poor case. Yes, I agree that government digital systems are going to be more complex than those of corporate entities, and I can see the argument that governments and councils therefore need to be more discerning about buying into projects like the Oracle one here. But fundamentally, Birmingham City Council has a payroll, and it needs to pay the people on that payroll, and it needs software to do that. The solution in the article seems to be to build a system that's... like a computer? It's difficult to even parse what that's meant to mean. Something distributed perhaps? Municipal authorities will be saved by microservices? Yeah, no.
It’s not business software, it’s enterprise software. That’s the key misunderstanding here.