Back in 2018, the Birmingham City Council decided that it would be getting rid of its legacy SAP-based finance and HR system and replacing it with the more modern Oracle Fusion. However, the project has been a fiasco since its inception, and a new report reveals that it is still pretty much in the "red" despite costing over £100 million.
Birmingham City"s migration to Oracle Fusion kicked off in 2018 and was expected to be complete in 2021, but it eventually went live in April 2022. The launch was disastrous as the council was unable to produce auditable accounts, resulting in major mismanagement when accounting for expenditures of roughly £3 billion. The city council then spent millions of pounds implementing manual workarounds to get the system working alongside a third-party cash management software.
The project apparently suffered from a lack of proper in-house IT ownership, poor governance controls due to required organizational restructures, and improper planning overall. This is something that is apparently still persistent today, as an independent review of the initiative has classified it as being in an "Amber-Red" state.
Audit committee member from the city council, Jamie Scott, argued that although the risk rating is Amber-Red overall, most milestones are in the red while a few are in amber, so the overall state should be Red. The council"s executive director of finance, Carol Culley, downplayed these concerns by emphasizing that assigning risk scores isn"t a mature process yet, noting that:
It would be very unusual for an ERP program to be at a green [risk rating] at this stage, but I am not diminishing the fact that it is currently on amber-red and there is a lot of work to do in terms of making sure we"re in the best position possible for go-live.
Keep in mind that the project kicked off in 2018 and was scheduled for a go-live in 2021, a deadline it missed. Over these past few years, the project"s estimated cost has ballooned to £131 million, which is a major increase from the initially planned budget of £20 million. Initially, the system was also expected to cover schools, but this is now out of scope. Although the council now hopes to complete the project for £108 million, that is still massively over budget, and the current Amber-Red status isn"t exactly a vote of confidence.
Source: The Register