WCC $100m+ IT Project At Variance with Council Direction

The Wellington City Council has just awarded an Australian company what likely promises to be more than $100 million dollars of work. This is for a shifting Information Technology (IT) Project called “Odyssey”. This is a strange choice for a number of reasons not least of which is the fact that the wider Council is very pro-local business (of which we have some IT rock stars), very pro local IT (Wired Wellington and other events) is sinking a lot of money into IT incubators in the city, is planning to spend more money on an IT precinct of which the star will be a central workplace for start up IT companies. So why have they chosen an international company instead of supporting they local, or even New Zealand, economy?

This will be a series of blogs, I’ve been given far too much information to get it all into 1,000 words and I have a veritable flood of feedback and documents pouring in from a variety of sources. If true, some of that information I have, will raise some red flags on the decision and the the likely success of the project should it go ahead.

But first, some background, and then, some questions.

Back in August 2013 Kevin Lavery bemoaned the fact that the Council had too many systems and embarked on a tender to set about replacing them. This week, it was announced that the tender was to be given in whole to an Australian company based out of Brisbane.

On the face of if this is a slap in the face for not only Wellington based IT companies but also New Zealand wide companies. Effectively the Council is saying that no IT company in New Zealand is up for the job. This despite the fact that there is a thriving community of local IT companies supporting Councils in some incredibly innovative ways, all over New Zealand.

So that’s weird…

Locals have expressed surprise at the Council’s solution choice, with many telling me that the days of buying an end-to-end integrated computer system from a single supplier finished in about 1995. Today, best of breed is the way to go, buying the best services from the best suppliers then tying them together into a single managed system.

The announcement has come this week while the majority of Councillors and Mayor appear to be on leave like the rest of us. The cynic in me finds that unsurprising. Surely, at a cost of likely more than $100 million the Council would need to be voting on and supporting this? When we have a $1.5 million dollar cycle way the subject of much debate at Councillor and Mayor level, surely this decision should be very carefully debated and authorised by full Council?

After all, this has the potential to cost the City as much as the Wellington Airport Extension, yet only save the Council a few million a year, after six years.

And those costs are, optimistic. A Deloitte Report on the costs of the Odyssey Project (which will be the subject of another blog) is incredibly optimistic. Stating that it will cost between $80m and $100m, my reading is that could easily blow out as the Auckland City Council project did, and possibly by similar tens of millions.

Some Council Officers have told me privately over the last few months that they feel that the entire Odyssey Project is a lost opportunity. That the approach and solution lessens the room for innovation and future development. That they felt their input was not listened too. If that is true, and hearing from the horse’s mouth I don’t doubt it, then the split between the Project and the business is already there, another serious red flag.

Then there is the fact that the solution will directly impact the way that ratepayers engage with the Council and yet, there seems to have been no citizen engagement to ask what it is that residents want to see. This is key, the Council did not engage with the community at all, as far as I can see. Evidence of who they did engage with can be found here.

This really is service 101. We are the customers, we are the ones who pay the Council a substantive amount of cash each year to deliver us services, we are the ones who have worked with Councillors and Mayor to develop better engagement around Smart City services, and we are the end consumers of this solution. For those of you in the IT industry, you know that not talking to the customer about requirements is pretty much asking for trouble on an epic scale.

But they never talked to us.

That’s weird. Actually, that’s arrogant.

We are now six weeks into a Council amalgamation discussion with a propaganda war already kicking off. So why would we start down the path of a potential $100m plus project before we settled that this year? Unless we, the residents of the Wellington region, agree to do nothing then any effort on this project will be impacted by changes we make. Whether full amalgamation or a variant of. That’s another red flag.

In addition, at the beginning of the Odyssey, it was claimed that all nine Councils would likely participate in the end result. Nothing of that this week, no other Councils have come out in support, no other Councils have trumpeted this decision.

So there you have it. Despite the Council making a very strong commitment to local business, they’ve given away the tender to an overseas company. At potentially more than $100m the full Council and Mayor don’t seem to be involved and the decision has been released while they are for the most part on leave. The costs, according to the Deloitte report, may be overly optimistic, in my opinion. No one has engaged with the community, public, and residents on what they want. We are debating amalgamation, which could change everything. There doesn’t seem to be support from the other eight Councils now, that there was at the beginning.

I don’t know about you, but at the very least, I’d expect this to be the Councils Ninth Economic Project and go through the same process as the other eight including community engagement and under the governance of Mayor and full Council.

More to come.

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Ian Apperly is a Freelance Writer and sometimes ICT Consultant. "I've been in IT for over twenty years and a freelance writer for longer. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, the city on the edge of the world." @ianapperley on twitter. Blogs at http://strathmorepark.org/ . Appears occasionally at scoop.co.nz .

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