Originally Posted by
corktownyuppie
CoD's unique problem is pretty much the same theme as all of its other problems. Its systems were designed for a different time and place, and its employees are probably not necessarily quick to transition after 30 years of "doing it the old way".
For example, it was once reported [[sorry, can't cite it or find a link) that the City of Detroit had over 100 different checking accounts, each assigned to different departments, committees, projects, etc. Well when you have that many chefs in the kitchen, there are bound to be errors.
Every big organization is going to have losses due to errors in accounting. The goal is to minimize those errors to the bare minimum by making sure that the systems themselves are streamlined. For example, if completing a mundane tasks requires 3 people to coordinate 5 consecutive steps in a series....the likelihood of error is many times greater than if it can be conslidated down to 1 person doing 3 steps in series. Payroll is complicated because of all the different moving parts. I think outsourcing it to ADP, Paychex, or some other 3rd party is really gonna have to happen at this point., IMHO.
I've seen a few real life examples where this has been relevant.
First, in my undergraduate fraternity, we used to have the undergraduate treasurer be in charge of bookkeeping, collecting all dues, and keeping the budgets. The last year in the fraternity, we somehow ran a -$2,000 cashlow one semester and collected less than 60% of our dues. After 3 years of controversial debate, the chapter finally agreed to pay a 3rd party a 3% commission to run the books. People bitched about the 3% [[leaving only 97% to spend), but in the final analysis, we've been at 99% dues collection ever since.
97% of 99 is a lot more than 100% of 60.
Second, one of my buddies owns a title company and he explains to me why he's reluctant to invest in property development in the city. He tells me [[and this might be dated, because he hasn't done it in 10 years) that he would go to the department to get title search done see who was the owner of a specific property.
He would show up in line with 5 or 6 properties to search, and then he'd get to the front of the line and the person would tell him that they would only do 1 property search at a time. So to get it done, he had to wait in line multiple times. And so did everyone else. As you can imagine, the people were not in a real happy mood of having to wait, and the people behind the counter weren't in a real happy mood dealing with angry people all day.
This could all have been solved if they said, "we can do one property search for you in real time right now. If you have more than 1, leave us the addresses and return in 4 hours, we'll have the information for you." That way, people wouldn't be waiting in endless lines, and the people doing the work wouldn't be surrounded by angry people.
So why didn't it happen that way?
- People are slow to change
- People aren't intelligent enough to see a problem and try to solve it
- Morale is low because leadership is lacking
- Triage....leadership is trying to put out too many other fires to deal with this
- People are underpaid and overworked
- The people in the system hold distrust toward the people who can actually solve the problems
- Etc. Etc.
There are hundreds of other operational issues like this that have been plaguing the city and it's going to take time to get through them all. While time is going by, budgets are getting cut, and manpower is becoming less qualified.
It's easy to blame the software, but I've worked with shitty software systems in all sorts of different jobs I've had. You have to learn to work around them to get the job done, and for whatever reason, our city employees can't make it happen. Seriously, I think outsourcing is going to be the only way to get this done.