Analysis: Why the Big Apple's IT is rotten to the core
Failed IT projects... costly over-runs... budgets embarrassingly busted.It is not just projects in the UK's public sector that can often go horribly wrong
Failed IT projects... costly over-runs... budgets embarrassingly busted.
It is not just projects in the UK's public sector that frequently go horribly wrong. A major row has broken out in New York after the resignation of the City's IT chief, Carole Post, over a series of IT project failures during Mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure in office.
Post resigned following the alleged mismanagement of a $2.3bn (£1.4bn) modernisation project to update the City's emergency calls and dispatching system. It is running some seven years late and a cool $1bn (£600m) over budget. It will eventually be delivered in 2015.
Post's supporters claim that the problems that have bedevilled the project pre-date her appointment, and point out that she will be the third IT head to leave under Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman who made his fortune building an electronic financial information and television news service.
However, her detractors point to a series of failures in the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, New York's IT department, which is best known by its acronym, DoITT – referred to as "don't do it" by disgruntled City workers, according to the New York Times. Post is officially the commissioner of the DoITT.
The Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP) was originally started in 2004 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City's Twin Towers. The idea was to consolidate the city's fragmented emergency services' call centres into two "public safety call centres" in order to better coordinate and manage emergency responses.
New York City Fire Department and the Police Department are now ensconced in one of the two call centres, while the second one is still being built.
That, at least, was the theory. But in addition to the delays and cost overruns to ECTP, the DoITT has also been criticised over an upgrade to CityNet, the city's internal network; continuing problems with CitiServ, the city's centralised datacentre; and, problems with NYCWin, the under-used municipal wireless network.
Analysis: Why the Big Apple's IT is rotten to the core
Failed IT projects... costly over-runs... budgets embarrassingly busted.It is not just projects in the UK's public sector that can often go horribly wrong
Despite a redundant fibre-based network, CityNet suffers repeated interruptions of service. NYCWin, meanwhile, cost $500m (£313m) to build and costs $40m (£25m) annually to maintain. However, it is under-used and, in any case, already outdated, say critics. The $95m (£59m) CitiServ project, meanwhile, has struggled with the migration of data from the old systems.
The series of shortcomings in the New York's IT systems led to repeated showdowns between exasperated deputy mayor for operations, Caswell Holloway, and Post, with Holloway demanding Post bring along subordinates to meetings to answer pointed and in-depth questions about the DoITT's problems.
In December, Holloway commissioned consultants McKinsey to examine the ECTP project, and their report was delivered recently. This week, Mayor Bloomberg said that he would challenge a court order to make the report public, prompting speculation about what he is trying to hide.
Nevertheless, an audit by the city comptroller, John Liu, does shed some light on the matter. Liu blames the cost overruns on poor project management by the city administration. After hiring HP in 2005 to handle the systems integration for ECTP and the project management of other contractors involved in providing services and equipment, the city also hired Gartner to act as quality assurance (QA) consultants on the project.
But Gartner's observations and recommendations were frequently ignored and the group's contract was discontinued in March 2011.
And the conclusions of Liu's audit were damning. He stated: "We found DoITT's overall project management of the ECTP lacking – due to its initial underestimation of time and technical constraints involved in implementing the multi-agency mission-critical ECTP – which therefore did not allow for project completion on a timely basis."
It continued: "The original project governance, roles and responsibilities, and project controls were found to be deficient by ECTP's quality assurance consultant in 2006 covering the 2005-2006 initial time period of systems integration work on the ECTP. Specifically, the QA consultant noted questionable judgement, poor decisions and deficiencies in the ECTP governance structure."
Even after eight years and $2.3bn (£1.4bn), the computerised dispatching system shared between police, fire and emergency medical services remains flawed.
Post, who is leaving for a senior IT role at the New York Law School, can justifiably claim that most of the problems pre-date her arrival – she was only appointed in December 2009. And she won't be going empty-handed: last year, she was made "2011 New York State Public Sector CIO of the Year".
The DoITT has 1,200 staff, an operating budget of $350m (£219m) and a capital budget of about $1bn (£600m).