Two former department heads and a series of blunders are to blame for the $120-million computer fiasco that Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick decried in this week's State of the City Address, according to city officials.

The Detroit Resource Management System -- called "Dreams" -- was the city's first major computer upgrade in 20 years and one of the Archer Administration's most ambitious efforts.

When it began in 1997, it was supposed to cost $60 million, be finished by late 2000 and enable the city to keep all of its financial and personnel records, including payroll, on one computer system.

But Auditor General Joseph Harris and others said Friday that the administration of then-Mayor Dennis Archer bought a computer system that hadn't been tried in any other major city, failed to modernize the city's outmoded ways of doing business before buying the system and then foolishly customized the computer program to conform with the city's old ways of doing business.

"We tried to help them, and they wouldn't listen," Harris said Friday. Harris, a City Council appointee, said he hired experts at the outset to help the city keep the project on track.

Harris said the project is only half finished, has cost twice as much as projected and is plagued with glitches. Instead of eliminating the city's reliance on paper, Harris said, employees must rely on paper and computers, adding to their workload. The city has nearly finished installing the financial system, but hasn't begun the personnel and payroll system.

Dave Rayford, Kilpatrick's chief information officer and a member of a new city task force trying to untangle the problem, agrees.

"It was misguided from the start," Rayford said.

Harris blames Archer's former finance director, Valerie Johnson, and information technology chief Nicole Fontayne-Mack for most of the problems.

Fontayne-Mack, who left in 1999 to become chief information officer in Broward County, Fla., said she did a good job despite the project's problems.

"I think it's an investment that will pay dividends," she said Thursday. Johnson could not be reached.

Archer, now the chairman of the Dickinson Wright law firm, said he shares the new mayor's frustrations. "He can't be any more concerned than I was," Archer said Thursday, adding that his staff wrung concessions out of the contractors to compensate for the problems. "Everyone worked in good faith. No one deliberately went out to spend more money than the city bargained for."

"The reality is that the system works and functions quite well," Archer said, adding that it's far better than what the city was using.

But there have been a lot of problems.

Instead of hiring an independent consultant to help it modernize its ways of doing business and then picking a reliable computer system, Harris said, the city started shopping for a system.

Instead of picking a simple system that had already been de-bugged in another city, he said, the city opted for a more complicated setup from Oracle.

Although Oracle Corp., of Redwood Shores, Calif., is a world leader in developing data base systems for private industry, it had little experience in any major city, Harris said.

Harris said the city compounded its problems by hiring IBM Global Systems to install Oracle's software. He said he thinks Oracle should have been the prime contractor. Carlton Orse, Oracle's former account manager on the Detroit project, said Oracle makes a fine product that is used successfully by General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and other major corporations.

"The system has the capability of working, but the city needs to change the way it processes its paperwork. They're still doing it like they did 30 years ago," he said. Despite the problems, Harris recommends completing the project and updating its day-today business procedures.

Rayford said that's going to be costly: at least $4 million to finish installing the financial system and $14 million to $20 million if the city decides to install the personnel and payroll systems.

Detroit Free Press

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