Mike Locatis inherited a mess when Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper appointed him the city's chief information officer in February.

The city's $18 million software system for handling key functions of Denver government, such as payroll, human resources and budgeting, was full of glitches.

Parts of the system - called ASPEN - had just gone through a $3.7 million upgrade so poorly done that it left the city auditor's employees scrambling just to issue paychecks on time and for the proper amounts.

The story of how Denver fumbled the upgrade of ASPEN and then hustled this year to put the system right again provides a glimpse of the uneasy marriage of high technology and government bureaucracy. For Denver, it was a pricey and contentious match.

Locatis had the daunting task of not only fixing rampant technical glitches from the upgrade but also helping various city departments adapt to using the system.

"It was very problematic," Locatis said last week.

The causes for Denver's difficulty with its software system are many: a management-by- committee approach that lacked direction, a dearth of training for the system's users, turf wars between city employees and consultants, and resistance to change. Interviews with 20 people involved with the project shed light on the problems.

Locatis, a technology veteran from Time Warner Cable, attacked the issue from several angles. He hired technological whizzes to iron out ASPEN's bugs. He cooperated with the auditor's staff to shore up their work. And he gained the confidence of city leaders, persuading them to provide the money needed for the fix.

It wasn't cheap. The City Council on Monday unanimously signed off on $346,000 spent this year on consultants who helped fix ASPEN. What's more, Locatis estimates the city will need to spend another $3.5 million through 2007 to further bolster the system and upgrade parts of it.

Goal: Centralized system

Don Mares, Denver's auditor from 1995 to last year, had a vision in the late 1990s.

The city handled its "back office" functions - payroll, human resources, benefits, budgeting, finance, purchasing - on numerous outdated, disparate and unreliable computer systems. Mares felt that Denver needed to centralize and modernize its technology and processes for doing those tasks and to do so before the Y2K bug arrived.

Mares and others assembled the technology and plans to build such a centralized, uniform system. They spent $18 million on computer hardware, software and consultants.

The software came from Pleasanton, Calif.-based PeopleSoft Inc.

City employees christened the system ASPEN for All Systems Performance Enhancement Network.

Initially, ASPEN's troubles were with management, not technology. City leaders opted to put an executive committee in charge of the project rather than a single person. The committee included appointees of the mayor's office, the auditor's office and the city's Career Service Authority, which represents 8,600 of the city's 11,000 employees.

Committee members worked poorly together. Decisions were hard fought and delayed. Turf battles ensued. Some factions of the bureaucracy resisted the change as a potential threat to jobs. And some departments did not assign their best people to the project.

"The system, when I left, was working incredibly well," Mares said. "They did, though, have training and people issues. "

ASPEN worked, and it got the city past Y2K. But it had enough difficulties that it became an issue in Mares' unsuccessful mayoral bid last year.

Software out of date

By 2003, ASPEN was out of date.

Software companies such as PeopleSoft continually upgrade their offerings, and they provide technical support only for the last few software versions they issue. Thus, once a software version becomes dated, the company quits providing technical support for it.

By 2003, Denver was three to five versions behind on its various components of PeopleSoft software. An upgrade was overdue.

The city enlisted consultants to help out, but instability plagued the process. ASPEN went through six directors in its six-year history.

And bickering on the management committee stalled progress.

"When you have directors going in and out like a revolving door, it's awful hard to plan a ... project," said Mel Thompson, Denver's budget director and a former ASPEN director.

The problems multiplied as the upgrade effort stumbled through late 2003. Employees alleged the consultants were commandeering the project unchecked. The consultants lamented a lack of resources from the city.

"I'm not going to blame the consultants," said Margaret Browne, the city's finance director and a member of the ASPEN executive committee from its inception. "They had a steering committee - the three of us - who were functional oversight but not technical. You can't supervise by committee."

The software had significant glitches when the city put it into operation in January. The consultants, meanwhile, had been gradually dismissed.

"Internally, we didn't have the background, the skills or the people that knew about this system," said council president Elbra Wedgeworth.

Denver never missed a payroll, but the auditor's staff had to work late nights - sometimes until 2 a.m. - to wrestle with glitches and make sure paychecks went out on time. Even so, some city employees received duplicate checks. Others got none.

Locatis' after-the-fact assessment of what went wrong lists four factors. They are a technologically insufficient upgrade, inadequate training of city employees, not enough testing of the software before it went "live" in Denver's operations, and a critical software component that did not get installed.

Hands-on management

After Locatis arrived as Denver's chief information officer in February, he started to address ASPEN's problems by adding technologically astute people.

Locatis helped recruit an experienced software manager and a sound payroll administrator, and he gained the trust of city officials who could authorize funding for ASPEN.

Locatis assumed hands-on management of the project, relegating the executive committee to an advisory role. Employees and consultants spent countless hours fixing bugs.

Locatis' team now has ASPEN running well enough, but it needs further maintenance and upgrades.

"Our committee meetings are no longer spent with 90 percent of the (talk) being about problems," Locatis said.

Rather, the committee speaks with Locatis about what new things the system might do. For example, they want the system to allow city employees to change their payroll deductions from their desk computers. Veteran council members are cautiously optimistic.

"Hope springs eternal," Councilwoman Kathleen MacKenzie said. "I'm convinced that a central database like PeopleSoft is the way to go. I hope that this (next) upgrade will work and that we will be able to have employee input."

Denver Post

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2004

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-- Anonymous, October 26, 2004