back to article Nottinghamshire back-end taken over by giant reseller

Nottinghamshire County Council is handing back office processes to Logica in a deal which hopes to save the local authority £5m a year thanks to shared services. The deal covers human resources, payroll, procurement and finance processes and is worth £7.4m over five years. The reseller and services giant will install an SAP …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Jacqui

    Logica and SAP - I smell a vendor locked fail!

    A long time ago we (as a small software house) were involved in discussions with a number of housing associations to roll out thier own "open" management software. This was after their common software provider was failing miserably to provide support and new features required to keep up with legislation.

    I have always through it insane that each council spends seperately to buy in the same software even if thier operational procedures is slighly different. I *know* they talk to each other and I know there are plenty of small businesses who can offer local support etc. Owning the core technology as shared/open source would be cost effective. Managing such a distributed project no longer has to be a nightmare and can be done "on the cheap".

    What you end up with is something that has no insane per desk licencing costs and you have no tie ins to a specific supplier - a council/housing assoc could have in house devs if they wanted...

    Jacqui

  2. Eddie 4
    Thumb Down

    Believe it when I see the £

    How many times have these outsourcing deals actually saved taxpayers any money? Normally service declines and the company renegotiates the contract to extract even more for less.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fucking brilliant...

    As a Nottinghamshire resident I'm pretty pissed off..

    There never has been any saving achieved by giving profit to someone else (outsourcing) that could/should not have been done in house. If you are inefficent change! don't outsource.

    Anyway have to look on the bright side it could have been crapita.

  4. Alan 6

    That should be fun

    We're having SAP imposed on us by our US overlords. It's so far been a two year project to ensure that all our processes are mirrored as closely as possible in SAP, but it's a serious culture change.

    SAP go live is Jan 4th, straight after the Christmas break, I don't think our IT bods will get much sleep during the break...

  5. Tom 38
    Happy

    I guess thats fine

    No conflict of interest here, Logica will handle procurement, and undoubtedly will find that Logica can procur other services better than competitors. Yay.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Creative Accounting

    So the story is Logica can do the back office process, save £5m a year, and make a profit.

    Is this;

    1) NCC management is so bad this is actually doable?

    2) Somebody has written a very "creative" business case?

    3) NCC forgot to include £5m of business processes in the tender documents, which they will have to pay £6m in additional service request to logica to perform?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    you can fool some of the people..

    My initial guess is that the finance dept have been heavily involved here and are just looking at the bottom line. Having experienced the said combination of "specialist provider" and "suitable software" I can offer only the following prospects:

    - expect the first 6months to year to go ok, with some of their "top men" working on the project (and by "top men" I mean "top men" ala Raiders of the Lost Ark)

    - expect the budget to at least double due to "unforseen" technicalities, hacking SAP from a perfectly suitable piece of software for manging a car plant into something kind of akin to a local government operation, but not quite;

    - after 6mths to a year, the "top men" will disappear to be replaced by sweatshop dudes in Indonesia and possibly India - expect a whole load of extra time to be take up when making your change requests to have to explain the complexities and process deviances in the system to said developers again... and again...

    - don't forget those pesky updates to all the modules you'll have.. and the attendant change requests that will cost because they've been hacked to fit into your bastardised paradigm.. oh and the cost for developers to go through and understand the system again, because it's the first time they have seen it and the there's no clear documentation;

    Still at least all the other councils that are in their sights will be able to learn from and share in the experience of Notts.... won't they?

    One for the reg hack. Find out who is the 'signoff' and watch for when they leave Notts, worth sniffing about at that time or just after.

    Grenade because it's not about the initial explosion.. it's all about the lasting damage you can cause to as many close by as possible.

  8. John Lodge
    FAIL

    This is going to work just fine - Not.

    Yet again another hair-brained money saving scheme which will end up cost three times as much as the original in house job...

  9. Ascylto
    Big Brother

    Guess what?

    It's all going to go horribly wrong.

    Remember ... you read it here first.

    What do you mean, you already knew?

  10. despairing citizen
    FAIL

    Deal Length vs Strategy Period

    Interesting question, the deal covers a 5 year period. What period does their Business and IT Strategy Plans Cover?

    Can they currently predict what will be mainstream IT in 5 years time?,

    I would suggest if they can, they should be working for Gartner, et al.

    As a local authority, they would be lucky to to keep a rolling 18 month strategy on the rails, given HMG passes new legislation, and new SI's all the time, thus not just moving the goal posts, but creating whole new pitchs in far away locations.

    Are logica going to want to charge when the government creates something brand new, like the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme under the Waste Emmissions Trading Act, and require ALL waste disposal authorities to have systems to partake?

    Thus I am currently hard pressed to see how a deal like this works in the public sector, at least in a relatively static private sector market (e.g. Motor Insurance), you can at least have a stab at planning the next 5 years.

This topic is closed for new posts.