I think its a bit unfair to lay BCC's woes entirely on the shoulders of its councillors. Certainly yes, they are guilty of not properly scrutinising details, and questioning certain policy decisions. But at the end of the day, the councillors don't actually 'run' the council, it is the 'paid' civil service and the executives and managers that do.
The Oracle fiasco deserves a full investigation of its own. My understanding is that Oracle develops and provides some quite powerful (and expensive) database applications and software systems, but these are spec'd and provisioned via third-party consultants and agencies. From what I read elsewhere, a system was configured and provided, on the understanding that internal business processes would be adapted. However some council departments insisted that the software should be reconfigured to suit 'the way they work', which is apparently the reason why this 'broken' software needs to be 'fixed'. To this day I still can't figure out why it will cost so much money to do so!
If Mr Caller is suggesting that they 'remove it', it would probably be more prudent to scrap the deal with Oracle, and seek refunds from the consultants/agencies. Then get someone to properly research and find some talented developers who can work with some kind of open-source equivalent, that would be far less costly to support and maintain.
Regarding Oracle, I'm just going by a very informative comment that someone posted on a Birmingham Mail article. The concept was scoped and implemented based on the notion that departments would adapt their working processes to suit the new software system. But what happened was these departments refused to adapt, and instead wanted the software to be reconfigured in order to suit 'they way they've always done things'. That in turn then suddenly required a bill of £100m to 'put the software right'.
It would seem that no lessons were learned from the Capita fiasco, which also saw the council out of pocket by huge sums of money (but everyone has conveniently forgotten about that!)
I agree. I would love to see local government using the same model for digital services as central government.
Government Digital Services was (and continues to be) transformative for the digitisation of government but local government appears to have learnt nothing from this masterclass in _doing it right_.
I don't know much about how central government transformed its services by going digital and would be interested to hear more. Do you know if there were any major hiccups along the way?
I think its a bit unfair to lay BCC's woes entirely on the shoulders of its councillors. Certainly yes, they are guilty of not properly scrutinising details, and questioning certain policy decisions. But at the end of the day, the councillors don't actually 'run' the council, it is the 'paid' civil service and the executives and managers that do.
The Oracle fiasco deserves a full investigation of its own. My understanding is that Oracle develops and provides some quite powerful (and expensive) database applications and software systems, but these are spec'd and provisioned via third-party consultants and agencies. From what I read elsewhere, a system was configured and provided, on the understanding that internal business processes would be adapted. However some council departments insisted that the software should be reconfigured to suit 'the way they work', which is apparently the reason why this 'broken' software needs to be 'fixed'. To this day I still can't figure out why it will cost so much money to do so!
If Mr Caller is suggesting that they 'remove it', it would probably be more prudent to scrap the deal with Oracle, and seek refunds from the consultants/agencies. Then get someone to properly research and find some talented developers who can work with some kind of open-source equivalent, that would be far less costly to support and maintain.
Interesting to read your view Stuart - yes, you are right they did try to adapt the system for their existing processes and it hasn't gone very well.
Regarding Oracle, I'm just going by a very informative comment that someone posted on a Birmingham Mail article. The concept was scoped and implemented based on the notion that departments would adapt their working processes to suit the new software system. But what happened was these departments refused to adapt, and instead wanted the software to be reconfigured in order to suit 'they way they've always done things'. That in turn then suddenly required a bill of £100m to 'put the software right'.
It would seem that no lessons were learned from the Capita fiasco, which also saw the council out of pocket by huge sums of money (but everyone has conveniently forgotten about that!)
I agree. I would love to see local government using the same model for digital services as central government.
Government Digital Services was (and continues to be) transformative for the digitisation of government but local government appears to have learnt nothing from this masterclass in _doing it right_.
I don't know much about how central government transformed its services by going digital and would be interested to hear more. Do you know if there were any major hiccups along the way?
It's been a hugely transformative programme which moved so much of government online. Everything you see on gov.uk is a part of that.
Their "about us" probably explains it better than I could: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service/about