Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

theregister.com

23 pointsBender11 comments

Private government contracts exist solely to transfer wealth from the taxpayer to private individuals.

There is a revolving door where government officials approve contracts and then go and work for said contractors at a later point, which is basically just corruption.

The tender process is a joke. There will be massive cost overruns and everybody knows it.

You see the same pattern play out with so-called "public private partnerships".

Remember this whenever anyone talks about small government and private sector "efficiency".

In small government, the government should not have the access to this money to begin with. You can roughly see how small your government really is by comparing its outlays (not taxes because of deficit spending) vs GDP. Corruption of this kind is still possible, but at least it would be less wasted money relatively speaking.

Cool, a tiny, corrupt government that's functionally useless, and services are provided by corporations that can easily outmaneuver these feeble governments, including the under-funded courts.

Sounds great!

I'm sorry but how do you deal with the fact governments are complex entities which require important software and IT infrastructure to function ?

From my experience building everything in-house is always going to be 10 times more expensive than any market rate software/service and it's also going to be worse, because IT/software companies are concentrating that knowledge and know-how and the government entities end up doing half-assed engineering with a few engineers where they'd need dozens.

At this point UK local government authorities should spend the money on suing Oracle. This is ridiculous.

>The council now plans to begin a "refreshed programme to implement Oracle Fusion as the preferred ERP system, based on a model of 'adopt not adapt' with a new set of suppliers…

LOL.

Story as old as time. Bean counters chase a cheaper ERP solution, but then everyone else wants the new ERP to work just like the old ERP. One 5000% overbudget later, the new ERP now works like the old ERP after spending 20 years worth old-erp subscription payments on only the upgrade. Or your project fails and you give up.

Government does it and so do businesses.

It's also why some ERPs are monstrosities because they also try and contort the ERP out of the box to make every possible sale.

The other joke is startups and vendors that say, ALL OTHER ERPS SUCK, IM GOING TO MAKE A STREAMLINED BETTER ERP. 10 years later its a monstrosity because they tailored it to make every possible sale just like the other guys.

How do they exist 10 years later? SAP, or another big name, will always be a better candidate for providing a 'monstrosity' ERP.

Because they come in lower cost and target smaller businesses who need a ERP. SAP is far too expensive in cost and labor for businesses at that scale.

Those smaller businesses and the ERP grow up together.

Can you list some examples?

There aren't that many companies that have gone from small and scrappy into a huge organization in 10 years. And I thought I knew all of them for the last few decades.

That's the thing with tools like SAP, etc., the "trick" is to "not make SAP do what you want via customization", because then upgrades will be horrific, but "make your business do things the SAP way", which also isn't entirely feasible.

I've had these ERP struggles for the past 5 years as we've been going through our migration to Dynamics 365. The harsh reality is there are an insane amount of ERP solutions out there, and most of them are objectively terrible to work with.

You hit the nail on the head, though. We make the most progress in the migration when someone leaves the company or a new person is brought in.

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