The budget for a Swansea Council IT project has more than doubled and Covid is largely to blame, leaders have said. The new Oracle Fusion system was expected to go live in November 2020 and cost £4.8m.
Councillors were told in January this year that the budget had risen to £8.4m and that the new system was due to be operational this month. But council leader Rob Stewart told the authority's scrutiny programme committee this week that the Oracle roll-out was now expected to cost £10.7m and go live in April 2023. The IT system has to be updated as the current one is reaching the end of its life.
The cost increases have been attributed to the much longer length of time needed to implement and test the new system – partly because council IT staff were seconded to other tasks during the pandemic, such as getting grants out to businesses as quickly as possible. You can read more stories about Swansea here.
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This, combined with staff sickness and vacancies, required external support to be procured from, among others, India-based IT firm Infosys, whose employees were affected by different Covid waves than those in the UK, adding to the delays. More recently agency staff have been brought in to help, pushing costs up further. And more Oracle licences will also be needed than had been anticipated. Cllr Stewart said £6.1m of the project's revised budget was "directly associated" with Covid costs and that he hoped to reclaim it from the Welsh Government.
Committee chairman councillor Peter Black asked the Swansea Labour leader how confident he was of this given, he said, that the Welsh Government had previously said it wouldn't reimburse Covid-related IT costs incurred by councils. Cllr Stewart, referring to the wider financial pressures facing central covernment, said he was "a little less confident every day" but that he was "up for very robust discussions" with Welsh Government finance officers and ministers.
Cabinet was asked to approve the extra costs for the Oracle Fusion rollout at a meeting on Thursday, October 20. Although Cllr Stewart said the council was "working towards" a figure of £10.7m there is a £500,000 contingency fund in place to cover any further rises.
Cllr Black said the report before cabinet didn't seem that confident that more costs would not be incurred. Cllr Stewart said further changes may be needed to the new system in the coming weeks and months and that these would be outside the council's control. "I won't sugar-coat it," he said. "There are risks in these types of programmes." Sarah Lackenby, the council's head of digital and customer services, told the committee that she anticipated the cloud-based Oracle Fusion system would be operational for 10 to 20 years.
Cabinet approved the extra costs when it met on Thursday morning. Cllr Andrea Lewis, cabinet member for service transformation, said the project related to "an essential back office system".
She added that dedicated resources had been allocated to ensure the April 2023 "go live" date would be met. Cllr Lewis also said that a report detailing all the costs would be brought back to the scrutiny programme committee in due course.
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