October 27, 2007

A couple of Million here, a couple of Million there...

Way back in the olden days, June 2004 the Gang in the Ivory Tower entered into a contract with MUNIS inc, to purchase a municipal resource management system. The installation of the system was to have taken 15 months. While they were trying to install the system everything that could go wrong ... did! The system never has been implemented.

The total cost of the system was to have been $2,642,000 over a three year period with an additional $344,176 for annual support and maintenance costs. As of January 3, 2006 the city had paid $1,687,514.09 on the doomed project. MUNIS inc has also presented the city with additional invoices for $342,588,33. This even though the system that MUNIS inc installed never did work.

During this time the city had hired extra employee's to overlook the MUNIS inc contract, they had employees from every department in the city in a review committee, the committee chose 5 vendors whose software met the cities requirements. They then choose MUNIS inc to supply the software. They had several demonstrations of the software for workgroups and then after all the brainstorming decided to have MUNIS inc go ahead.

From the beginning, performance issues began to be identified, several hundred issues were identified and 186 of those issues still remain, out of the 186 issues 72% or 144 were classified as Critical of High Priority.

So now the Gang in the Ivory Tower has lost almost $2,000,000 of our tax money on this failed system and on Oct 29 th are going to authorize spending another $2,000,000 + on another system. How many times does a person have to burn their fingers before they learn not to stick their hand on a hot oven? How many Council members does it take to lose $2,000,000? Apparently it takes 7.

The funny part is that $2,000,000 is almost the same amount the Gang in the Ivory Tower lost on the infamous Bus/Home bus stop.

Rellis Smith
res@venturastuff.com