Philadelphia buoyant after completing water billing system
Years of headaches pay off, with final phase built on time, under budget
January 18, 2008 (Computerworld) -- When Michael Nutter was sworn in as Philadelphia's new mayor on Jan. 7, he and the City of Brotherly Love had a new, functional water billing system in place.
The initiative, known as Project Ocean, had become a high-priced mess for the city in recent years, resulting in costs approaching $47 million over two decades, according to the city's controller in a report issued last August.
However, the final phase, with new off-the-shelf billing software from Prophecy International PTY in Adelaide, Australia, was finished and operating one month ahead of schedule. It was complete Jan. 2 at 25% less than budgeted, according to city CIO Terry Phillis and Prophecy.
The final phase took 12 months to complete instead of the projected 13 months, and cost $5.7 million, down from the $6.7 million budgeted, Phillis said yesterday. The goal of finishing before Mayor John Street left office was met, he noted.
More than 550,000 water customers in the city will not see much of a change in their bills, except that the bills will be more accurate, and the system itself will be more flexible. The $1 million in savings will be used in a subsequent project to set up customer self-service water and sewer billing via the Web, Phillis said.
The new system, built with Prophecy's Basis2 software by a city-led integration team, replaces a 30-year-old custom-built Cobol mainframe billing system that had relied in part on punch cards. With the new system, Phillis said the city will be able to change the billing process quickly, perhaps in days compared with up to a year with Cobol programming.
With the new system, the city can make changes to billing, such as deciding to add fees for storm-water drainage or allowing customers to include features that help them track their efforts to conserve water, Phillis said.
"Converting this thing over was a huge effort," Phillis said. "We had to deal with 30 years of garbage data in the old system."
Phillis and the city chose Prophecy last January after deciding to scrap most of the Oracle Corp. applications it had planned to use. Phillis helped implement a team of managers from three city agencies to oversee the project and put himself in charge of the integration effort, working with contract workers and city agencies.
Project Ocean started in 2002 with Oracle on board, but work was stopped in October 2005 after the city spent $18.9 million, twice what it expected to spend. The city signed an amendment to Oracle's contract in which Oracle agreed to pay or forgive $6.9 million of those costs to fund the revived Project Ocean.
The amendment with Oracle went forward, representing a $6.9 million savings. With that savings included, and the $5.7 million incurred in the past year, the total cost since 2002 is $19.7 million. The final phase of costs is still less than half what the billing industry estimates a similar billing system should cost, Phillis and Prophecy said.
Phillis said the city controller's estimate of nearly $47 million includes many years of costs for changing the system prior to 2002.
Even though Phillis is a CIO, he said the biggest lesson he's learned from the experience is that "technology is not the prime concern in being successful in a project of this size." Instead, he said, success is a matter of "process, collaboration and leadership," although he said it is obvious that "the technology has to work and it has to match your skill sets."
A year ago, he said, "we had to spend a lot of time upfront deciding how to run this and how to collaborate between three departments."