Birmingham council's 'equal pay' bankruptcy provided cover for Oracle disaster

https://theconversation.com/how-birmingham-city-councils-equal-pay-bankruptcy-provided-cover-for-ongoing-oracle-it-disaster-224416

by zeristor • 2 years ago

108 73 2 years ago

theconversation.com

zeristor• 2 years ago

I had to mangle the original title a fair bit to fit:

“How Birmingham city council’s ‘equal pay’ bankruptcy provided cover for ongoing Oracle IT disaster”

FirmwareBurner• 2 years ago

1. What exactly is "equal pay" in this context?

2. Is there any IT consultancy that ever does a job right and in budget?

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

1) Basically it was found that jobs done predominantly by mens had bonuses which could more than double basic pay, but not those predominantly done by women.

An employment tribunal found in favour of female workers employed by Birmingham city council in 49 different jobs, including lollipop ladies and cleaners, who complained of being excluded from bonuses – worth up to 160% of their basic pay – paid to men.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/apr/28/pay-female-s...

2) Not usually at that scale - particularly if the decision making/effective management is done by elected officials who may not be there for the whole project and where large project management experience/skills aren't what gets them elected

fanf2• 2 years ago

In Britain, councils have a permanent civil service who are responsible for running the council. The elected councillors are responsible for policymaking and oversight.

OJFord4• 2 years ago

1. Female/male emoloyees paid the same for equivalent role.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-66730165

AmericanChopper3• 2 years ago

It heard workers in roles such as teaching assistants and catering staff, had missed out on bonuses given to staff in jobs traditionally done by men, like refuse collectors and street cleaners.

Did you read your link before posting your commentary about it?

shubb2• 2 years ago

Specifically, Birmingham had hired these jobs at the same pay grade, after formally assessing them to be equivalent. It then paid people hired under the same contract differently with special payments after garbage strikes.

If they had hired under a more complex pay grade structure, they would have been fine.

This is relevant to tech companies which may use fairly simple level structure.

Arnt• 2 years ago

To 2, yes there is, but that's not newsworthy.

forinti• 2 years ago

You need very strong technical oversight, something that is often missing when a job is handed out to a contractor.

If you don't have that, you should hire it, although I haven't seen anybody offer this kind of service. Maybe that's something that needs to evolve in the IT industry. And, no, Gartner et al. don't count; they are just buzzword pushers.

sparsely• 2 years ago

Gartner et al. need to be seen as trendy and at the forefront of each industry they are in, so as you say there is never a trend they won't jump on. I suspect there is some value in actually talking to their analysts to work out which products actually work well, and which failed implementations are really due to client problems, but their written reports aren't much more than a list of the biggest players in each sector.

hugh-avherald• 2 years ago

In response to the points made in this article, Birmingham city council said: “The implementation of Oracle has been the subject of extensive discussion in the public domain.”

Well, all is forgiven.

LVB• 2 years ago

My state of Oregon paid Oracle something like $250M for a healthcare system that never materialized. The lawsuit that followed was settled for $100M, but most of that was “free” Oracle licenses and no less than $60M of customer support.

Drakim• 2 years ago

I don't understand why any human being on planet earth would ever hire Oracle at this point, it's like asking for trouble.

doctor_eval5• 2 years ago

It’s like paying for trouble.

Tabular-Iceberg3• 2 years ago

The question is rather why people like asking for trouble so much.

paxys• 2 years ago

The people making the decisions get kickbacks, and the general population is stuck with the bill.

Clubber2• 2 years ago

Not to give Oracle a pass, but there was plenty of blame for the state as well.

https://upperedge.com/erp-program-management/7-decisions-tha...

tacticus• 2 years ago

Granted 2 of those mistakes were chose oracle and listened to oracle.

lhomdee• 2 years ago

None of the in-year deficit cited in the section 114 notice relates to the settlement of new equal pay claims. And none of the £149 million of cuts to services relate to any deficit created by equal pay settlements.

Instead, the council’s spiralling deficit, estimated at more than £300 million, appears to relate to the disastrous launch of the Oracle IT system that went live in April 2022. Originally budgeted at £40 million, the latest report by the head of financial planning to the cabinet on February 27 2024 showed that the Oracle finance and human resources system has now run to an astonishing £131 million. <end>

In short Birmingham Council claimed that equal pay settlements are the reason for the bankruptcy, but the investigation shows that an Oracle IT implementation which has overrun its budget is to blame. The nefariousness is not just mismanaging the project, but casting blame on a scheme that’s supposed to correct more past wrongs. It’s turtles all the way down.

dandare• 2 years ago

Frustratingly the article makes no effort to explain what they mean by equal pay liability.

The same goes for something called "savings delivery rate" that supposedly dropped form 91% to 70%.

And the mentioned "£131 million" for the Oracle finance and human resources system, is that annual or lifetime?

fweimer• 2 years ago

Clicking around a bit leads to this:

“ The 2012 settlement followed a landmark court ruling which found hundreds of mostly female employees working in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners and catering staff missed out on bonuses which were given to staff in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners. ”

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-66042403

These £131 million are likely just for the initial implementation, given that the number grew rather quickly in recent times: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-66042403

tomatocracy• 2 years ago

The "landmark" part of the 2012 court case was actually about how far claims could effectively be backdated, not the "equal value" part of the claims (which as I understand it was relatively straightforward because the council effectively admitted they were equal value by applying a common grading scale for all employees from what I understand). The UK supreme court judgment in question is here:

https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2012-0008-judgme...

pjc502• 2 years ago

The Oracle number is, I think "one off". But some of that number also appears to be "intended savings that could not be made".

The savings delivery rate .. is something of a work of fiction, but if you build a new accounting system sold as being able to give greater insight and reduce costs, and it does not in fact reduce costs, or even work properly, that obliterates the hypothetical "savings" that were intended.

arethuza4• 2 years ago

That's almost certainly implementation costs - paying consultants to make the off the shelf software work for an organisation.

mikelitoris• 2 years ago

Lol I have never heard of a single happy customer of Oracle. How do they stay in business? Is it just about finding new people to scam every year?

automatic6131• 2 years ago

How do they stay in business? Oracle's main line of competency is not providing good software services. They are in fact, specialists of acquiring government contracts.

doctor_eval5• 2 years ago

I did a proposal for a very large city council in Australia some years ago. We were a little upstart company with an idea that fitted nicely with councils priorities.

Long story short, they loved the proposal but they were quite clear that unless we “partnered” with a company like IBM, we had no chance.

The reasoning I was given was that they needed a company that was big enough to be able to accept liability for failure. In other words, someone they could theoretically sue.

It was one of the most depressing meetings I’ve ever attended.

phonon• 2 years ago

Did you show them your company's Errors & Omissions (E&O)/Professional Liability policy?

If your limits are high enough, some customers would find that acceptable.

Tabular-Iceberg3• 2 years ago

It’s really only us tech nerds who actually see through the scam.

When you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re spending other people’s money, the greater the cost and complexity the greater your accomplishment looks.

arethuza4• 2 years ago

If I had to guess I doubt if this was actually Oracle's fault - sounds like implementation problems not problems with software itself?

navane• 2 years ago

That's it. All problems solved by a week of smart work get zero recognition, because "it was an easy problem". But if you tender to the oracle's of the world, use teams of people, preferable switch sub contractor half way, it looks like a massive undertaking with the appropriate recognition. Corporate snakery is all about visibility.

graemep• 2 years ago

The of the news I have read about this before has mentioned Oracle, so the real news is the attempt to deflect blame.

What has been missing from much coverage of it has been any mention of the cause.

What the multiple failures show is that there was pervasive bad management, not a failure in one area.

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Not coming clean and using the cover they did is pretty slippery behaviour, unfortunately it fits right into the worst kind of behaviour people expect from local politics.

It also fits right into the agenda of certain right wing papers who were happy to publish the story, I bet they don't give the same prominence to the fact this is an Oracle problem.

p_l• 2 years ago

Note that pushing it on 'equal pay' settlements also covered up for the senior executives who were responsible for Oracle issues.

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

It's also often forgotten that local government in the UK has two income streams:

* Council Tax, which is based on the value of your home. * Government funding, which makes up the vast majority of the income.

The latter has seen a cut of £800m in the last 13 years.

Birmingham has been set up to fail by a government run by the other political party. The same area is also covered by the West Midlands Combined Authority, which is headed by an elected Conservative mayor. Somehow, his organisation has tons of cash to do all sorts of nice projects (like campaigning to rebuild a wonky pub) but doesn't have any tax raising powers (something they're very proud of).

Where is that money coming from? Why is it not being used to bailout the council instead of forcing 20% tax rises on residents along with shutting public services.

Birmingham has been left out to dry by political opponents. Nothing more, nothing less.

switch007• 2 years ago

Pedantic point but they have more streams than that, but the grant is certainly the largest and the council tax definitely notable.

brigandish2• 2 years ago

Why should a failing organisation, that knew cuts were coming and still went ahead with this disastrous project (among many others) and broke the law (a law implemented by the same side of government) that consequently cost them a huge barrel of cash, be bailed out?

Let them fail, make cuts, make government smaller because it fails just like this again and again.

bananapub2• 2 years ago

for context, tthe actual reason Birmingham Council is fucked is the same reason that nearly every council in Britain is fucked: the deliberate policy choice by central (what every other country calls "federal") government to de-fund councils and cause them to slash things for 14 years and now start collapsing.

funding from central government is now at 40% below 2010 levels: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-go...

Symbiote• 2 years ago

Only the small number of countries that are a federation of states/provinces call their highest level of government "federal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation

brigandish2• 2 years ago

Like all levels of government, they spend too much on things they don't need to, inevitably. Blaming too little or too much money when these organisation have many millions and sometimes billions available (certainly in the long term) is to miss the point entirely.

They waste what they have through poor implementation. That's the story here.

bananapub2• 2 years ago

this is an extremely dumb take, kudos.

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

Easy to blame something you sort of "understanding" than something you did not?

captaincaveman2• 2 years ago

PwC and KPMG were appointed to help rectify problems with the system earlier this year, while the council had previously employed EY on the implementation.

I'm sure those three bandits lined their pockets nicely!

bastard_op• 2 years ago

Has anyone ever heard of an Oracle project that has ever ended well?

After 25 years in IT consulting all over the US in different businesses, Oracle is never NOT a 4 letter world, where projects involving them always over-promise, under-deliver, and project costs end up some 3-10x any initial projection. Particularly any ERP, CRM, now EMR in hospitals as well since acquiring Cerner. Anyone that does use them only do as a necessary evil of some dubious or shady circumstances, otherwise Oracle is a term almost universally reviled and hated amongst end users and organization leadership alike.

anotheruser13• 2 years ago

30 years ago, when I was a grad student, Oracle was just a relational database rather than the bloated, unwieldy mess it is today

Disclaimer: n=1.

Birmingham council's 'equal pay' bankruptcy provided cover for Oracle disaster

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