IT Brain-broken Detroit being Rebuilt from Scratch
An outstanding article by Crain's Amy Haimerl details the crisis of the City of Detroit's broken, obsolete and insecure Information Technology [IT] system, the brain at the heart of its operations, and the plans and challenges new CIO Beth Niblock faces to fix it. It is so bad that it has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
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[Tapped by Duggan after being part of a White House assessment team] she agreed to come and fix an infrastructure so fundamentally broken that police precincts can't share information, smartphones can't sync with city systems, 70 percent of financial reports are entered by hand, $1 million checks are found hiding in desk drawers, and the tax system was called "catastrophic" by the IRS in an audit.
And from later in the article
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For example, it costs the city $62 to cut a payroll check because the system is so manual it takes 149 full-time employees — including 51 uniformed officers — to run it. At a cost of $19.2 million per year.
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she is focused on replacing all of the city's computers, 80 percent of which are at least four years old and almost all of which run Windows XP or older. That makes the city's "fleet," as Niblock calls it, obsolete by industry standards. Microsoft doesn't even support XP any longer.
The path back...
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- Establish a CIO.
- Evaluate citywide IT infrastructure.
- Promote civic innovation.
- Make freely available open government data more accessible and usable.
- Develop a 311 system, which is similar to 911 but for nonemergency calls about city services.
- Improve enterprise geographic information systems.
- Enable online permitting.
As the CIO of Louisville, Niblock had no idea she would be the check mark for item No. 1.
The costs and savings are immense and once functioning properly expect a few worms to be discovered.
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Fixing the IT infrastructure of the City
Where do you think they should start first ?
-The tech expert Mayor Mike Duggan hired to overhaul Detroit's hopelessly antiquated computer technology testified to just how bad it is.
Duggan recruited Beth Niblock from Louisville,Ky., where she was that city's information technology chief.
-She said Detroit is "generations behind" current standards. The city's e-mail system is unreliable, and the city's systems susceptible to cyber-security attacks. The outdated computers complicate tax assessment and collection, internal communications, issuing employee paychecks and dispatching for the city's police and fire departments.
--"It is fundamentally broken or beyond fundamentally broken," Niblock said. "In some cases fundamentally broken would be good."
