Mercredi 25 septembre 2024 à 11:50

#OnMaPartagé la vidéo YouTube nommée Pourquoi les projets informatiques vont dans le mur ?.

Je ne connaissais pas la dérive de ce projet de migration de SAP vers ERP Oracle Fusion de la mairie de Birmingham : La 2e ville du Royaume-Uni s'est déclarée en faillite, plombée entre autres par les dérives d'un projet de migration vers l'ERP Oracle Fusion. Après des années de retards, de problèmes de contrôle, de gestion hasardeuse, la facture du projet a quintuplé pour atteindre 115 M€.

J'ai fait quelques recherches dans les commentaires Hacker News et j'ai trouvé ceci :

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.

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Actually it's the opposite. I worked for an NGO half a decade ago, and they wanted to add 2FA authentication to their login system used by ~400 staff. I created a quick demo using Google Authenticator in less than a week.

However the director of IT didn't like this solution. He insisted we use RSA keys and hire IBM to build a solution using that - I think the original estimate was a few million $ and it would take six months or so for their team (of basically new graduates) to build.

I asked my boss why the director was pushing so much for IBM to build it:

He told me that if we build it, and it doesn't work, then the director has to take the blame. If IBM build it, and it doesn't work, then IBM take the blame.

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Yes. There’s also the revolving door problem. The bureaucrat making the decision is often angling for a cushy role at the contractor. And the contractor is making the offer under the table to get the gig. From the decision makers perspective, it doesn’t matter if the project succeeds, they’ll be long gone. I’ve seen this with my own eyes.

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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.

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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.

An insider at Birmingham City Council who has been closely involved in the project told Computer Weekly it went live “despite all the warnings telling them it wouldn’t work”.

Discussing how the Oracle system failure impacted the council’s ability to manage its finances, the insider said: “We were withholding thousands of supplier payments because we couldn’t make any payments. We didn’t have any direct debits for cash collection. We had no cash collection, no bank reconciliation. When you do a project of this size, you must have your financial reporting and you must have a bank reconciliation system that tells you where the money is, what’s being spent and what’s being paid.”

Since going live, the Oracle system effectively scrambled financial data, which meant the council had no clear picture of its overall finances.

The insider said that by January 2023, Birmingham City Council could not produce an accurate account of its spending and budget for the next financial year: “There’s no way that we could do our year-end accounts because the system didn’t work.”

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The June 2023 Birmingham City Council report to cabinet stated that due to issues with the council’s bank reconciliation system (BRS), a significant number of transactions had to be manually allocated to accounts rather than automatically via the Oracle system. However, Computer Weekly has seen an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation presentation given in 2019, which shows that the council was made aware of these issues at that time, three years before the go-live date.

...

The lack of a functioning BRS has directly contributed to the council’s current financial crisis. In BCC’s April 2024 audit report, councillor Grindrod said: “We couldn’t accurately collect council tax or business rates.”

As of April 2024, it is believed the manual intervention needed for the bank reconciliation process is costing the council £250,000 per month.

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Peoplesoft/Oracle ERP has had over 30 year of experience selling to local governments globally.

When dealing with procurement in countries that aren't the US, riles and regulations are much more difficult and unintuitive, and also provide marginal RoI.

This is why companies like Workday and Salesforce don't care to compete with Oracle or SAPs in these kinds of contracts - they don't have the right relationships with channel partners and systems integrators needed.

When a city council places a tender for an ERP system, they won't be doing the work in-house due to regulatory and budget allocation reasons. Instead they'll farm out the work to local contractors, MSPs, and Systems Integrators instead.

PLG driven companies like Workday and Salesforce dislike working with SIs and MSPs as much because channel partners don't care about upselling features in the products they bought - they wanna keep the customer satiated instead.

Also, the dollars spent getting the contract might not have a significant RoI when factoring the contract size itself.

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J'ai trouvé ceci sur Reddit :

I work as an implementation consultant for finance software, albeit a much smaller scale one than SAP/Oracle, but I’ve been in this line of work for several years. This kind of thing is fairly common, and I think a several year long project that Lidl undertook to do the same thing went the same way, which is money down the toilet.

All of the cost is in the services. The clients are billed at an hourly or daily rate for meetings, project management, issue resolution, emails etc. The problem with huge projects like these is that institutions like councils have their own very specific processes and are unwilling to change, because more often than not the employees are set in their ways and don’t want to learn anything, but also changing one or two things could have a huge effect on other things. In finance systems there are often several integrations, both incoming and outgoing, and the client will need a tailored solution to migrate everything. It would be easy if the client accepted that some things would have to change, but SAP and Oracle are very very customisable, and depending on the company doing the implementation everything will get customised to where there are all these new moving parts, new problems, and new things to learn. People also change their minds about what they want all the time, especially if the project wasn’t scoped or managed correctly.

In short, the software may be established, but the way it is implemented never is. Templates exist, but every business is different, and the public sector is particularly messy to deal with (underpaid and undertrained staff, tend to be a bit less motivated than private sector IME).

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I tried several different SaaS solutions, mostly aimed at breweries. It was infuriating watching these things fit 98% of the requirement, but the missing 2% rendered the whole system inoperable. But the choice is just take it for £50/user/month or leave it.

I tried some open source options which were better, but were still far too rigid to a point where we'd be shaping our whole operations around the way our ERP wants us to do things, and getting to that point would take a lot of development.

In the end, it was legitimately easier to do it ourselves. And by that I mean me, a distiller, to develop a system from scratch. We now have a fully integrated ERP system that works around our processes, but was built using good practices so that things are very versatile and don't inherently depend on working a certain way. Some of these systems had moronic limitations that wouldn't even allow for an output to be used as an input into another process. Apparently everything has to be made in one process! Can you imagine how many use cases that single, completely unnecessary, restriction... restricts?

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