Now Birmingham loses £s as well as apostrophes

By Paul Dale on Jul 3, 09 11:00 AM in

Birmingham City Council, the local authority that decided to ban the use of apostrophes in road signs, is spending a lot of money on developing a new website and when officials tested the super-duper IT they discovered.......yes, you've guessed it, there were no apostrophes.
That might not have been so bad, but there were no pound signs either - which was a bit embarrassing given that the new system is supposed to enable citizens to pay council tax bills on line and make inquiries about other services.

The glitches are being blamed for a lengthy delay in introducing a new version of www.birmingham.gov.uk, the council website that has been universally slated for being hopelessly difficult to use and lacking in anything resembling modern communication tools.
This will be an open invitation for dissent to stroppy backbench councillors who do not buy into the council's business transformation project, which aims to save £1 billion over 10 years chiefly through introducing better IT systems.
Members of the finance scrutiny committee have been asking about delays in launching the new website for weeks and have been fobbed off with a variety of excuses - only now are the real reasons becoming apparent.
Nor will the scrutineers be impressed by a refusal to state how much the website project is costing.
Council officials say they are not being difficult, it's just that they don't actually know how much they are spending on upgrading the IT.
In a story that will be instantly familiar to anyone with a cursory knowledge of Birmingham City Council, it appears that the bill is split among various departments and it is far too complex to work out a total. They might have a figure by next Tuesday, but don't hold your breath.
This, of course, is one of the main brickbats thrown at business transformation. Costings seem to change almost on a weekly basis and when you attempt to drill down to discover exactly how the savings are to be made, it's all very murky.
Deputy council leader Paul Tilsley has said the authority has to make sure everything is working correctly before the new website is unveiled.
He is dead right there, since the reputational damage to Birmingham if the system turns out to be a load of rubbish would be huge.
Birmingham: the city that banned the apostrophe and the pound sign.
It could be our new logo, if we're not careful.

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Mark Steadman said:

This might sound like a copout: I'm hardly a BCC apologist, but pound signs and typographical apostrophes (rather than the ones you find on a Windows keyboard) are notoriously troublesome, because different content management systems deal with them in different ways.

I won't go into the technical reasons for this, but it's to do with databases and things called "character sets" which determine how symbols are saved to disk and displayed online.

So in short, a quick patch to their CMS will most likely sort these issues out in a heartbeat, so don't panic just yet ;)

-M

July 6, 2009 9:31 AM

Ursula said:

Paul, I love apostrophes. For that reason alone they need to be applied at all times, with vigour.

What I don't like one bit, Mark Steadman, are incomprehensible comments. What on earth are "different content management systems"? "Typographical" apostrophes? Pardon? Come again.

It is precisely that type of foggy insiders' speak (and - by your own admission - laziness "I won't go into detail") that leaves the layman in the dark (where, in this case, I wish to be left).
U

July 8, 2009 6:31 AM