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Birmingham City Council’s cabinet has approved a plan to spend £46.5 million this year to rectify serious problems in its implementation of an Oracle Cloud system.
It gave its support to a report and recommendations on the issue on Tuesday, with an indication the overall cost of the implementation will be in the region of £100 million.
This follows reports of long delays and a major cost overrun, with elements of the system not having gone live despite an original launch date of December 2020 and a later one of April 2022.
The plan to rectify the problems involves two phases: first to fix urgent issues to ensure the delivery of the council’s legal and policy obligations; then to optimise the original plan for the system based on a management review.
Funding is expected to come from a combination of existing service budgets, reserves and potentially capital receipts.
Impact on finance and HR
The council said the full extent of the issues was only uncovered by senior officers and councillors in April of this year and means some critical elements of the system are not functioning adequately. This has had its largest effect on day-to-day operations of finance and HR.
It highlighted the issue that a significant number of incoming and outgoing payments are having to be manually allocated to accounts rather than automatically via the system, which is creating a backlog.
This is affecting the council’s ability to formally close its accounts for 2022-23. It is now working with its external auditors with the goal of doing this by the end of August.
From the HR side, there have been issues identified related to recruitment, data management and monitoring processes to update renewals of Disclosure and Barring Service checks. Manual processes are in place to work towards resolving these issues, with a priority on people working with children and vulnerable adults.
Lessons to learn
Birmingham’s cabinet member for finance and resources, Cllr Brigid Jones, said: “It is never easy when implementing a new IT system for an organisation of our size and scale – but there are lessons to be learned from what has happened and I am determined that the council will learn from this.
“Most important of all right now is the need to work at pace to resolve the issues we are facing and to be open and transparent about what they are. The focus of the council leadership on this will be relentless in the weeks and months ahead.
“Through this report, we detail what needs to be done and the plan for how to fund this, giving us a way forward to ensure effective and efficient systems and processes are in place as soon as possible.”
