The importance of taking time to get IT right
The dust has yet to settle on the 67-page auditor’s report looking into what went so badly wrong at Birmingham City Council with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) project to replace SAP with Oracle, yet there are plenty of unanswered questions.
One councillor said to Computer Weekly: “Were the senior executives not being truthful to the external auditors? I think this is one of the things we need to understand as an organisation.”
According to Grant Thornton auditor Mark Stocks, “there was an optimism bias”. Listening to a number of meetingsthat presented the profound findings of the report, as an outsider, it does seem the whole debacle is being politicised, and it may well have been a political decision to avoid any bad news coming to light regarding this flagship project.
The decision to go live in April 2023 was rushed through. While testing had been carried out in many parts of the system, for Thomas Foster from Grant Thornton, “the testing wasn’t complete and there were key areas that hadn’t been tested”.
While the headlines are that Birmingham chose to change the Oracle software rather than its own internal processes, it seems that not enough time was spent on user acceptance testing. There appears to be a blame culture in the council meetings. Many of the Tory councillors put the blame entirely on the Labour administration. Yes, it happened under Labour’s watch, but every member of the council should have been given an opportunity to understand the importance of what one councillor described as “open heart surgery” – ripping out and replacing an ERP system. Indeed, in 2020, a scrutiny committee was established, prior to Oracle going live, and a letter sent to council members with a link to an article looking at ERP failures. In other words, information about ERP implementation risk was being shared. Council officers who raised concerns appear to have been sidelined.
Were the Labour council officers avoiding legitimate concerns about the Oracle project?
Between all the political mudslinging over the past few weeks in Birmingham, the ongoing refuse collection strike – which one councillor said has led to rats the size of cats in the city – and the council’s continued financial woes, one thing is becoming very clear: senior executives must take charge of major council IT projects. They need to be close enough to understand what is going right and what is going wrong. But just as important, they need to be unbiased and prepared to accept bad news, even if this pushes back the go-live date.