Council Computerisation Reality Check

In April 2009, the Listener Magazine ran an investigative piece which considered the new National Government’s proposals to restructure Auckland local government. It was a good piece. And I wrote to the Listener’s Letter page shortly thereafter….

I trust that Minister of Local Government Rodney Hide reads your warning that he should hasten slowly in reforming Auckland Local Government.

This would be the biggest merger in New Zealand’s history with $23 billion in assets and the jobs of 6000 at stake, let alone the hopes and dreams of Auckland’s 1.4 million citizens. It is important to get this right…..

Last week Auckland learned the Royal Commission recommended without good reason the abolition of Community Boards, and for many good reasons the retention of existing City Council structures. This week we learned that Government intends the exact opposite by abolishing City Council structures and retaining Community Boards. Unfortunately, neither approach provides Auckland the critical mix of local scale to deliver big urban regeneration projects, balanced by local representation.

Undeterred by criticism so far, and determined to complete this reform before elections next year, Government proposes an Establishment Board with its own statutory power to force change.

Topping its list must be the job of getting eight council computer systems to talk to each other. This might be called the Integrated Council Information System. INCIS for short. Tread carefully, Rodney, because you tread on community dreams."

Did you say "INCIS" - what was that?

That last paragraph is the key one today – with news that upgrading Auckland Council’s new computer systems will cost ratepayers around $500 million.

In a previous life I spent ten years working on very large scale computer projects. Mostly in the UK, and even wrote a book about it: Computer Media, Published by Comedia in 1984 I think. You can still buy copies on Amazon. The behaviour of IBM was a core theme of my book. But I digress.

Almost 20 years ago New Zealand went through its last INCIS crisis. Only that time it was the Integrated National Computerised Information System developed by IBM for the NZ Government and Police. This was to deliver a single computer system with some 3,500 desktop terminals for a cost then of around $84,000,000. Supported by a business case of course – apparently Treasury believed it would save $300,000,000 through reductions in frontline staff.

After running for about 4 years, with the budget up to $130,000,000, and apparently 900 variations to the functional specification already documented as the scope grew, the Government pulled out of the project. Counter-claims and threats of legal action flew between New Zealand Government and IBM. There are some great bits of archive on the internet about this, starting with this summary of the Ministerial Inquiry into INCIS.

A key finding of that inquiry was this:

2.2.1 The scope of INCIS has never been satisfactorily addressed in the documentation. In the initial Information Systems Planning exercise the scope was defined as 'intelligence within the Police'. At no time were the boundaries set, or the role of INCIS defined and set in context within the Police.

Ring any bells here? For Auckland Council? NZ Herald’s report today suggests there’s no ownership of this amalgamated council computer project. It appears to have a life of its own. Mr Ford and the Transition Authority have washed their hands of it, Ex-Hon Rodney Hide has too, and even the Mayor (though - to be fair - he did inherit this can of worms.)

While abolition was playing out in the last days of ARC I did talk with technical staff. There were several council computer systems in Auckland that used the same SAP platform. So they could be integrated. It would require the others to be changed and integrated. But this didn't happen. There were clear favourite Councils in the transition process (ie some whose systems and staff were largely carried over intact in amalgamation), and others that were entirely abolished. I am advised the initial plan to "integrate" the 8 or so different council computer systems was to build a web-based front end, layer it over the old systems, and leave it up to this layer to interpret which database to update etc etc. What was to follow that in the longer term, and how successful that preliminary stage would be - nobody could say.

What is happening now is a predictable consequence of the approach to amalgamation that the Transition Agency favoured: disintegration followed by top-down rebuilding. This has led to massive institutional fragmentation. The consequences of this will be felt most sharply in parts of the organisation responsible for computerised information systems.

Auckland Council’s computer system development, its new INCIS, has the potential to get very out of hand, very quickly. Bad, early decisions, have very expensive consequences later on. Once Council commits to a development pathway it can’t easily change horses. So the CEO's comforting words that the expenditure of $450 million is "over the next 10 years" are not of any great comfort. Especially if it's good money after bad. At the very least we need to learn from the old INCIS which took years, great cost and wasted effort before the decision to cancel. There are benefits in maintaining separate computer systems: resilience; performance bench-marking, for example. In the days of distributed processing and extremely powerful desktop computing, one big central computer doesn't necessarily mean better.

Council's Governing Body needs some very good – and probably very expensive - advice now. This cannot be left to fester.

If you’d like to see how the previous New Zealand INCIS played out in media and among the discussion threads, check these bits of archive.