Is your licence fee worth it?

This is not about the crude and humourless antics of J Ross and R Brand, but the lazy journalism perpetrated by BBC Somerset this week.

Aunty Beeb took a news release from Somerset County Council and ran it - unchecked - as if it really was proper news.

 

Company is 'saving council cash'

A firm which took over administrative services for Somerset County Council has identified £60m of possible savings after just a year, the authority said.

The report was a fiction made up in County Hall. SouthWest One has yet to prove a single saving. It was all about the vague possibility of saving money. It did not add up to a row of beans. SouthWest One was invented to save money. It originally promised to save £200 million over ten years. This has now been trimmed to £150 million. But both figures came without any explanation. This joint venture between Somerset, Taunton Deane, Avon and Somerset Constabulary and IBM was intended to attract new customers. But after a year there are none. Bang goes the hope that economies-of-scale would deliver tangible savings. Instead the founders are now strapped for cash and shelling out for the dubious benefit of IBM's technology.

SAP stands for Systems Application and Products. It was created in 1972 by a bunch of IBMers. It sells a computer solution for business which is the Ford Mondeo of its type - one size fits all. SAP is adequate as long as you operate simply. Local Government is not simple. The need to sort and sift information is an ever-changing necessity. You can't do the job on the cheap. And SAP is only considered cheap if you don't attempt change. That's the problem. There was nothing wrong with the IT system Somerset County Council currently uses. But if you go into partnership with IBM then it becomes IBM who TELL you what system to use. So SAP it is. And what a costly muddle it is already proving to be. SAP is meant to go "live" in Somerset early next year. But the programme is way behind schedule. And Taunton is crawling with SAP "consultants" - up to 150 of them - trying to make it work.

The bill will come in at £30 million plus (rather more than Somerset has managed to lose on its recent Icelandic bank gambles)

The rewards, judging by recent experience, look equally stark. SouthWest One is getting a hand-me-down version of SAP that was designed for Bradford Council.

Bradford, remember, is a compact metropolitan area - not a sprawling county

"Bradford has regrets on efficiency project"
3 October 2008

City of Bradford Council has said that short cuts taken early in its Bradford-I SAP implementation have proved to be false economies. Becky Hellard, the council's strategic director of corporate services, said the decision to automate existing processes, rather than redesigning them as part of the project, meant this work now remains to be done. "If we had spent some time reshaping our processes, then setting the system, rather than taking a process and putting it into an electronic process, we could have been further down the track," she told a session at SAP's World Tour conference at Wembley Stadium in London on 2 October 2008. Bradford recently completed the SAP implementation within two weeks of its 20 month schedule and within 3% of its budget. It includes enterprise resource management, customer relationship management, business warehousing and revenues and benefits. "In retrospect, we have probably paid out more," Hellard said about the consequences of early cost cutting. Although the city bought a business intelligence module, it did not purchase the training required to use it. It also waived any sharing of risk as an economy measure. Bradford's SAP implementation is part of a 10 year, £170m deal with IBM, running from 2005-15, under which the city's ICT staff have been seconded rather than transferred to an external supplier. The contract value has increased from the £158.5m when it was awarded, due to extra work being added. She added that Bradford had underestimated both the training required – "any training estimate you've got, you probably want to double it" – and the effort to retain staff who had developed SAP experience. "These employees are highly valuable, and guess what, they get poached. We won't let that happen again," she said. She also said that there was not enough oversight of the contract, with only 2.5 full time equivalent posts at the city to run it, but added that there are plans to strengthen it.

(Kable's Government Computing)

Bradford had much longer to get it right. And Bradford was a single customer. But in Somerset there are two councils and a Police Authority - all with different needs. IBM said it could be done in ten months. Stupidly the partners nodded agreement.

Now we learn of bitter rows and the usual IBM attempt to steamroller progress.

Within Avon and Somerset Police, for example, the process of restructuring the workforce to cope with SAP is being pushed through without any consultation. UNISON advised its members to lodge an official "grievance" every time the agreed Management-of-Change Policy was breached or ignored. Needless to say the union was inundated with phone calls and e-mails from members who said that as soon as they lodged a "grievance" the bosses tried to bully them. 

The air of desperation about SAP is obvious. What is less obvious is the cost factor. If SAP fails to work on time - by February - then it isn't IBM picking up the bill, it will be the partners who will have to pay extra. In other words US.

 

Meanwhile the founding members of this venture are faced with mounting cash crises. Taunton Deane Council has a £1million deficit. Its Chief Executive is currently on leave with reported back pain. Or stress. Or both.  Somerset County Council may be even deeper in the red. A figure of £17 million has been mentioned. The Chief Executive admits in his weekly Proper Gander(31/10/08):

"There are some really serious challenges facing our communites in the coming year and there just isn't enough money to do everything that we would like to do to support them through it."

The stress levels of Somerset County Council's Chief Executive are a matter of speculation.

Perhaps his health and continued tenure at County Hall will become a new and very expensive bargaining counter?  

Perhaps he will claim that critics, like me, have harrassed him beyond endurance?

Perhaps he is already an expert in this area?

Perhaps he should seek arbitration?

Never mind that his bullish weekly bulletins to staff (this is the latest drivel) tell a different story about his state of mind.

If the Chief Executive should ever play the "I've-been-made-sick-with-stress-by-all-these-public-insults" card in order to obtain months of paid sick leave followed by a half a million quid in his back pocket then never mind Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand - there will be thousands of furious council tax payers leaving blunt messages on his answering machine.