[wdmmg-discuss] Lambeth Council Corporate Financial Ledger

Wed Jun 9 10:07:32 UTC 2010

Richard,

This is great work!

I'm at exactly this stage with a number of councils at the moment.

I've found that just asking for the data with reasonable redactions (e.g. 
I don't want individuals council tax payments) doesn't work -- in general 
the people who manage the system would need to devote lots of time to 
figuring out what to do.

I suggest almost writing the queries you want for them, so I'd ask for the 
tables from the Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement and any other 
part of the Oracle E-Business Suite that may contain the data you want 
(and give instructions for how they can obtain this). I'd ask for the 
training materials for using the system so you can really understand the 
system in the way they do. I would also offer your assistance in 
understanding the structure of the data and extracting the data, saying 
you would be happy to meet them to explain what you want in more detail 
and do all you can to help.

Good luck and keep us updated on how this goes,

Lisa

As the database is Oracle e-business suite, I guess they use

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Richard Pope wrote:

> Can anyone suggest how to progress from this very prompt reply I got
> from Lambeth Council asking for details of their spending database:
>
> http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/details_of_spending_databases
>
> Which points to this system here:
> http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/financials/index.html
>
> I want to get at all payments including company details over an
> arbitrary figure. I am not interested in individual people's pay (it
> includes HR data which I assume means individual payments to members
> of staff).
>
> How should I ask for it?
>
> Richard
>
>