birmingham

📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more:

Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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📅 Daily note for 9 July 2024

Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLG⬈ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSIT⬈ (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) which is potentially exciting.

It will be interesting to see where the Local Digital programme ends up – staying in the policy department or moving across with all the digital teams? #

UK Authority reports⬈ on Birmingham City Council extending their contract with Oracle, despite it being a pretty disastrous relationship thus far. I commented on LinkedIn, and am pasting here for posterity:

Am not sure what their alternative was, to be fair. They have to have a system to do this stuff, and signing with another supplier would mean starting the whole implementation process again on top of the licensing costs – and I can’t see how that would offer better value for tax payers.

Also we have to bear in mind that Birmingham has a budget of £3.2 BILLION – using the standard ERP estimate of 1-3% of budget, means anything in the range of £12 – £36 million.

This is an exceptional case and the numbers have to be huge. I personally think a big issue here originally was the fact that the budget was nowhere near big enough in the first place – which of course means that the original business case was fantasy stuff…

Personally, I would be glad if no council ever bought Oracle ever again. But in this specific case, the reason things went so badly wrong were not entirely the fault of the technology vendor:

  1. the decision to replace the existing system, chasing a highly speculative ‘transformation’ dream – based on a recommendation made by a certain consultancy firm that ought to have known better
  2. a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
  3. a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
  4. massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
  5. a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.

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How Rushmoor Borough Council have saved money on printing and posting⬈. #

This is really interesting from Richard Pope⬈:

Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.

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📅 Daily note for 2 July 2024

Kiasmos⬈ have been providing some of my favourite beepy-boopy music of recent times. They have a newish album out⬈, which is excellent. My favourite track of theirs, though, is still Looped⬈ from their 2015 debut album:

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We had the July edition of LocalGovDigital Live!⬈ This morning. We were meant to have a session on the Open Referral Standard but sadly Jukesie was poorly and couldn’t make it. So, we had more of an open discussion instead. Think it went ok, although personally I think these things work best with a proper presentation of some sort. #

Stefan pointed out⬈ – quite rightly – that my idea for publishing a daily note and then adding to it throughout the day will be terrible for a lot of RSS subscribing types. This is because RSS feeds don’t tend to appear as new when they have been edited, only on publishing. So, I won’t do that! #

Somehow I missed this post⬈ when it appeared a couple of weeks ago. The digital folk at Birmingham are continuing to do some amazing work despite the financial situation they find themselves in.

Finding ways like this to improve the small tactical stuff is really important. Doesn’t take away the need to focus on big picture, long term structural change – but having both running in parallel means people are seeing results and improvements all the time. Good for morale! #

The linking-to-paragraphs solution I figured out yesterday has made my mind spin a few times around what other bits of blogging heavy lifting could be done on my desktop rather than server-side. Suddenly a switch has been flicked and I kind of understand the appeal of flat file blogging engines, like Jekyll⬈ etc. #

Another little presentational tweak to the blog – post titles now have an emoji prefixing them, as a guide to what they contain. So daily notes have a calendar, links posts a link (duh!), longer pieces an open book, techie bits a person behind a laptop, and a TV screen for video posts. Am doing this manually at the moment, suspect there would be a way to automate it but I can’t be faffed. #

The complexity is the attraction – reflections on trying to use crypto⬈ – interesting stuff from Terence Eden, especially this:

I don’t need to know how the underlying infrastructure works. I don’t need to understand how the global financial system works. But, with crypto, I need to understand staking, gas fees, bridges, offramps, DeFi, and a dozen other things. This is stupid. It makes insiders feel smart because they have embraced the self-created complexity, and allows them to feel smug that normal people aren’t as smart. That’s it. That’s why some people love crypto.

I suspect this may be true of other technologies, too. #

Daily note for 14 December 2023

Not been looking forward to today really. I have to go to see a foot specialist about an ulcerated wound on the balls of my right foot. It’ll be good to start getting it sorted, but it involves going somewhere I have never been before, not sure about parking etc, and the whole thing fills me a bit with worry.

I had no idea that Sarah Lay was back working in local gov, but am delighted she is.

A reflective, open and personal post from Carl. People – including ourselves – are not perfect, and that’s just the way it should be.

The challenge now for design in policy – I like a lot of the stuff in this post, which includes lessons that work for many relatively new disciplines, not just design.

LocalGovCamp next weekend!

Next Saturday (14th July) sees LocalGovCamp coming back to Birmingham!

It’s a great opportunity for innovators across local government to get together, share problems and come up with solutions. It’s also an honour (and occasional inducer of panic) to be able to put the event together.

I was ably assisted this year by those titans of the local government web world, Si Whitehouse and Dan Slee, who were my eyes and ears in the West Midlands – thanks guys.

With over 100 people signed up, we’re up to capacity now, but there’s a waiting list on the Eventbrite page if you fancy sneaking in last minute if others have to drop out.

Also props to Vicky Sargent at Boilerhouse for designing and organising the printing of the t-shirts.

Many thanks to the excellent sponsors who are helping to make this event happen:

FutureGov

Talk About Local

UKGovCamp

…and of course, Kind of Digital have chucked a few quid into the pot as well.

Am looking forward to seeing everyone next Saturday (and Friday night too – news of curry to come soon…) and those that cannot make it can follow the action on the hashtag #localgovcamp.

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