back to article Somerset County Council to review 'shambolic' SAP system

In opposition, the Conservatives criticised Somerset CC's Southwest One "secretive" outsourcing deal with IBM. Now the party is in control, after beating the Liberal Democrats in last week's county council elections. "Lately they've made some awful mistakes, and it's those mistakes we need to put right," Ken Maddock, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SAP !

    Horrible, horrible, horrible system

  2. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Linux

    Fun and Games

    ""It's a complete shambles." He added that currently, Maddock did not know what was in the contract governing the joint venture, due to its confidentiality clauses."

    Can you imagine what a new national government will find whenever Labour is swept away?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @amanfromMars

    There must be something wrong. I understood every word of your comment, and it even seemed relevant. Has your account been hacked?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC: 07:32

    SAP is a great system when deployed properly and the proper training given. Unfortunately, this is where IBM lacks skills. IBM tend to wade in with all guns blazing with the slick sales bullydroids and then they completely fail to provide the goods.

    No - I'm not associated in any way with SAP other than a satisfied user in the recent past.

  5. N

    Stress And Pain

    My invoice for £19,999 is in the post!

  6. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Boffin

    RE: @AC: 07:32

    Have to give cautious agreement - SAP can be a pain, but that's well known, and the usual approach is - if you can - to run the new SAP implementation alongside the old tools for a period to make sure they agree before switching off the old. To run a partial system in production sounds like just really bad project management. The cautious agreement is because I've done Government work before, and it is the Land of the Moving Goalposts! Often, political decisions will take precedence over technical realities. Either way, I suspect the blame lies either with poor project management from IBM GS or just poor control from the Council (which IBM GS probably wouldn't be too upset about, as every goalpost move gives them the chance to lengthen the contract and add on some more charges).

  7. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Keeping IT Sublimely Simple

    "@amanfromMars ... There must be something wrong. I understood every word of your comment, and it even seemed relevant. Has your account been hacked?" ...... By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 8th June 2009 08:15 GMT

    AC,

    I much prefer to Work, Rest and Play in the Belief that we are both getting smarter ...... as all alien postings have a relevance to that which they are posted in response to. Any arising confusion must therefore then be due to a Lack of Other Vital/Virile Information which would need to be Shared to allow for Further Processing and which would then deliver Transparency/Clarity.

    And Such Clarity when it is missing, is always Quickest and Best Supplied with a Direct Questioning of Source.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SAP - whatever you want it to be

    Dont blame SAP, if you use it as it comes out of the box then it works. If you want to change it then it can be done but if the person changes it is no good or more likely the customer requirements are rubbish then it wont work.

    Personally I'd like to know why we vote for local councils only to find its run by a massively expensive CEO and management team who werent voted in. Why dont we have the same as Westminster. I know local councillors are not the sharpest but the CEO's are a bunch of useless thieves anyway. Save some money by getting rid of one lot....

  9. Karim Bourouba

    Blimey, Somerset on the Register?

    I spent the formative part of my life in Somerset, so right now I am completely shocked to see Somerset not only in the news, but on The Register.

    I am not shocked to see some sort of scandal involving dodgy receipts though.

  10. Schultz

    @amanfromMars

    Your translator thing is definitely getting better. Keep talking to that fish!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @ACs

    Don't just single out IBM as someone who can't properly implement SAP. Oracle and others have had their problems too. Just ask Nike who had to report a BILLION dollar (USD) loss due to the fsck up of their SAP implementation on Oracle.

    The point was already made that you need to have sharp people who know what they're doing in order to have a successful implementation....

    That said, IBM, Oracle, etc ... all want their margins so when they bid on a large project, in order to get the client to bite, under estimate the work then get the customer to pay more.

    I wonder how many Indian contractors were on this project?

  12. RichyS
    Thumb Down

    Invoices from IBM

    So, what's the betting that IBM start submitting invoices that are less than 20 grand?

  13. Paul Webb
    Coat

    @Karim Bourouba

    Not only Somerset but Bridgwater on the Reg! No 'e' in this Bridgwater hence no email, eenternet, just one eel of a mess.

    Mine's the one with the bailing twine for a belt.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    confidentiality clauses??

    how can there be confidentiality clauses when out tax money is being used to buy it? i want to know whats happening to my money

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    And the shame is ...

    ... that the people responsible (probably highly paid civil servants) will not be accountable as it was merely one of a set of proposals put before elected members.

    So technically it is the elected members that are wholly responsible in name, deed and act.

    Equally technically the dullwitted civil servants are wholly not responsible in name, deed and act as they only made manifest the wishes of the Council.

    (un)civil servitude rule #1

    thou must never be held accountable

    (un)civil servitude rule #2

    thou must always let elected members take full responsibility

    (un)civil servitude rule #3

    thou must never compromise thy pension for any means (and this means any and all means)

    (un)civil servitude rule #4

    whenever facing something of reasonable complexity thou must always appoint people so that they are acting beyond their competences (when the poop leaves the scoop thou wilt be untarnished)

  16. Karim Bourouba

    @Paul Webb

    Yes indeed! It is a fine time for good old Somerset today, in the tech news and lauded for the councils ability to allow fraud!

    All they need to do now is draw a link to the dodgy land deals taking place on the coast (possibly) and Somersets destiny will be complete.

    It's not often the third world of England gets mentioned in the tech news, happy day!!

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SAP

    LOL

    Over priced, German, endless software factory!

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Thanks for the heads-up

    My invoice for £19999.98 is in the post.

  19. Tony

    Slow and Painful

    Interesting that so many respondants chose to remain anonymous? I used to, but I no longer care what anyone thinks. (Working with SAP does that to you) I would be happy to put my full details and they can then all go and KMHA

    I say this because we are implementing SAP, and I fall in the category that don't like it. Yes it has it's good points and I can see that some of these make sense. But it is a bugger to implement, and with respect to the comments about working out of the box, there are very few companies that could use it that way.

    Based upon the amount of work that we've done and the money that we have spent (and still not yet working), it really would have been better and quicker to have employed a couple of programmers and written an application inhouse which would have done the job for us in the way that we need (and probably a lot cheaper as well). The thing that really annoys me is that most of the problems were predicted 2 years ago and suggestions made to try to prevent them; but hey, I'm only the IT manager, why would I know anything.

    We are working with a smaller consultancy - however, we've still had in excess of 40 consultants working on the project (I've actually lost count). Of those, I would suggest very few of them really knew what they were doing (perhaps a quarter?) And it's quite clear that they are not communicating very effectively with each other which is causing major issues.

    But ultimately you need to understand that the business model of SAP is not about selling software or an application - it is very much about sellling the consultancy and other services. That's where they make their money, and it ain't gone change anytime soon.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @AC Monday 8th June 2009 09:05 GMT

    >Dont blame SAP, if you use it as it comes out of the box then it works. If you want to change it then it can be done but if the person changes it is no good or more likely the customer requirements are rubbish then it wont work.

    I entirely agree with that. But there are a couple of snags. First, SAP, off the shelf is utterly useless for most organisations. That doesn't worry me in itself as a failure point, but it does mean that you then have to get someone good to make it do what you need.

    So, you now have three options:

    1) Get someone bad at SAP. Result: a bad SAP system

    2) Get someone good at SAP. Result: a good SAP system that rapidly becomes useless because your users will need more and more changes, overloading your people. If you can afford to get more, you get locked into a horrendous cycle of needing more and more good people just to keep a lid on the system. Meanwhile, your users have all gone back to using spreadsheets and only putting things in SAP when they absolutely have to.

    3) Get an absolute SAP genius. Result: no SAP system because he turns up with a pile of other software that does a better job at a 10th the cost, while encouraging your users to actually use it...

  21. Simon Lacey

    Computers?

    And software? In Somerset? It's all lies I tell you!

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Fire me, fire you.

    I'm not sure they can 'fire the supplier' because I suspect the work is being done by the joint venture organisation, of which IBM is but single partner and the other partners are the councils/police service/whoever has taken part. Still, it sounds good, and that's what really matters in politics.

    Aside from analysis, IT infrastructure, and project management, who is actually doing the SAP work? Is it IBM, the council, or some of the verrrrrry fine people that SAP can supply to populate a project trying to get it to "work out of the box" (ha ha ha).

    AC cos, well , you can probably guess...

    Mine's the one with the 2012 calendar in the pocket.

  23. Goat Jam
    Black Helicopters

    The King is Dead, Long Live the King

    In an unusually lucid moment, amanfrommars asked;

    "Can you imagine what a new national government will find whenever Labour is swept away?"

    I thought much the same thing when Barrack Obama swept into the Whitehouse.

    However, it seems that there wasn't much interesting to find from 8 years of GWB's reign after all.

    Either that, or the people controlling GWB were the same ones who are pulling Obama's strings now, and they have no interest in letting the truth out.

    They might let Obama come out with the odd bit of low level truth here and there but they would ensure that it was not enough to cause too much in the way of civil unrest and just enough to give Obama a thin veneer of credibility.

  24. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
    Stop

    I like SAP...

    Speaking as an independent SAP consultant, my experience is that SAP implementations that go bad are actually bad even before SAP has even been loaded onto a DEV environment. Like any technical delivery, preparation is key and most failures are primarily due to...

    1. Bad or incomplete business process and requirements analysis.

    2. Bad systems analysis on legacy and middleware/integration architecture.

    3. Bad project and dependencies management.

    4. A siloed and disparate view of how SAP operates effectively across an enterprise.

    5. The misplaced belief that the integrator conforms to and understands SAP best practice.

    6. The client giving the systems integrator too much freedom over the management of the delivery.

    I agree, the SAP UI could be better, but I find it funny how no-one reports on the thousands of successful SAP implementations that have been done by hardworking IT professionals.

    Just not newsworthy eh El Reg?

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Had high hopes

    I live in Somerset, and was hoping that Somerset One might lead to some work that I could commute to. Unfortunately, IBM chose to host all of the systems in Warwick, so no infrastructure work in Somerset.

    Still, can't complain too much, as they found me a job just over the border, in Devon. Imagine!

    Must stay anonymous, as I really enjoy getting home every night.

    Mixed feelings, so I really don't know what icon to use.

  26. BeefStirFry
    Happy

    System Integrators

    IBM are following what Accenture did at National Grid 2 years ago. Same problems with the SAP Invoice Management System, not actually paying invoices on time, huge backlog built up, so they paid everything under £1000 without checking whether there was even a purchase order for it.

    SAP is a great system.

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