Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco
theregister.com
theregister.com
https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2001-02/weekly/5865/8.h... (Cambridge Uni)
"Customized ERP" should strike fear into the hearts of anyone interested in public spending accountability. It means the organization's process is somehow non-standard in ways that will require thousands of little changes at gradually increasing cost.
It sounds like Birmingham is digging themselves out of the hole by installing basic non-custom Oracle and then just fixing up their processes to match, which is what they should have done in the first place.
(Also, why isn't there a standard, prefereably open source, software deck for running UK councils? They're all operating in basically the same legal environment.)