Birmingham City Council’s Oracle implementation was supposed to be a modernization success story. Instead, it became one of the most expensive public sector failures in recent memory. In this video, I unpack how a $40 million ERP project ballooned to more than $200 million, why governance and oversight collapsed, and how a rushed go-live turned into years of financial chaos. The council’s decision to replace a 25-year-old SAP system with Oracle Fusion without the right internal expertise or governance created a perfect storm of technical debt, manual workarounds, and missing financial data. This is a cautionary tale about vendor dependency, project management turnover, and the dangers of pushing “green status” reports to save face instead of solving problems.