London’s Southwark Council is seeking over £700,000 in damages from IBM for a master data management deployment it has described as ‘unsatisfactory’.

The MDM project began in 2005. A review of the project’s progress in 2007 reportedly found a number of problems including a serious deficiency in a core component of the implementation.

The council now alleges that IBM failed to remedy the issues raised during that review, and that the resulting system is unfit for purpose.

An IBM spokesman said that Southwark Council’s claims “have no merit and we are strongly defending the allegations made in the legal proceedings”.