Detroit Finance System Sputters after Overhaul
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In 1997, the City of Detroit announced a plan to revamp its financial software with a three-year, $47.9 million project called the Detroit Resource Management System, or DRMS, commonly referred to as Dreams. It should have been called "nightmares."
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The initial plan called for the integration of 43 departments and 22 computer systems onto a single system that would run financial, human resources, and payroll software from Oracle Corp. Five years and more than $130 million later, DRMS has delivered only the financial applications, and the city has not begun to implement the HR and
payroll applications that were supposed to be the project's big payoff.
To be sure, the nation's seventh-largest city has reaped some benefits from the project. It now has functional, modern financial software and a new network of computers to support it. "DRMS is not a boondoggle, it's just a very high-cost system that still has deficiencies," says Joe Harris, auditor general of the city of Detroit and a longtime critic of the project.
Detroit's program fell short for several reasons. For starters, the scope of the project was beyond what could reasonably have been accomplished with the resources allotted. Also, the bureaucracy of the city was resistant to change, forcing the software to be adapted to old business processes instead of the other way around.
Turf wars prevented useful feedback and criticism from reaching the right parties, and training costs for city workers were grievously underestimated. Meanwhile, lead integrator IBM Global Services (in the midst of the Y2K crunch and overheated dot-com economy) was having trouble staffing the project with competent workers, and Oracle's software—the same used by corporations—couldn't handle all of the arcana of municipal finance.
Some of the particular problems were specific to Detroit, or to public projects. But in its broad outline, the DRMS fiasco could have taken place in a corporate environment as easily as a public one.
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