Although the federal government’s information-system miscues get a lot of attention, there are plenty of local- and regional-level snafus. Here’s a sampling of a few recent projects that have run aground.
Bexar’s Bear of a Project San Antonio’s Bexar County (pronounced “bear”) is feeling the hard edge of a recent SAP installation. The $4 million initiative, dubbed CHRIS (County Human Resource Information System), was installed by Baltimore-based Cedar Enterprise Solutions Inc. and was supposed to track the compensation, vacation and sick days of the Texas county’s 4,500-plus employees.
Last year, Bexar officials discovered CHRIS was arbitrarily adding and subtracting leave time from employee records. The flaws were so large that many county offices reverted to and are still using their old systems. County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff is not happy and is demanding accountability.
“What we’d like to do here is develop baseline measurements for success: Did we get what we paid for? Did we get the full measure?” he says. “Those are the questions that remain provocative here.”
