Philadelphia Controller Alan Butkovitz released a 29-page report that detailed the costs since 1987 of replacing the city's 30-year-old proprietary Cobol mainframe billing system that still relies on punch cards.
Yes, punch cards, you read that correctly.
Costs have already exceeded $35 million and could reach $46.7 million, the controller's report stated.
Last January, an attempt began to replace the old water billing system with commercial off-the-shelf software for water billing called Basis2 from Prophecy International Pty. of Adelaide, Australia. Most of the previous plan to use Oracle Corp. applications was scrapped.
The Oracle applications cost $18.9 million, twice more than it initially expected to, without getting a working system.
Now, the Prophecy software and related costs will total $6.7 million, bringing the Prophecy and Oracle costs to $25.6 million.
The controller's total cost of $46.7 million includes years of work prior to 2002 when the Oracle work started. There was project creep between 1987 and 2002 which enlarged the initial costs.
I find this appallingly expensive, wasteful, and inefficient but typical of how money was wasted in dead-end projects. The non-innovative East attitude seems to be, if it was good enough for my grandfather, it is good enough for me.
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