King County will try again to modernize computer system — for way more money

King County Executive Ron Sims' plan to replace the county's aged accounting and payroll computer systems will, if successful, take more than a decade longer than originally planned and cost three times as much.

The total cost is now estimated at $137 million, Metropolitan King County Council staffers told the council's budget committees. Here's the breakdown of the numbers:

• $84 million for the new systems

• $11 million already spent planning and designing the systems

• $42 million spent on a failed attempt to complete the job in 2000.

Those numbers don't include projected 15-year interest payments of $43 million on bonds that will finance the job.

The current price of $137 million is more than three times larger than the 1997 budget of $39 million.

Now slated for completion in 2012, the project is intended to replace systems that were installed in the 1970s and that use the old COBOL programming language.

It also will unify the still-separate finance and payroll systems that were operated by King County and Metro before they merged in 1994.

Sims has asked the County Council to appropriate $84 million to begin the process of installing the new PeopleSoft personnel and payroll system in November and the Oracle finance system in January. After those systems are in place, the county would install the Cognos budget system.

The project is called Accountable Business Transformation, or ABT.

It's Sims' second attempt to replace the old computer systems. The first try, known as the Financial Systems Replacement Program, was begun in 1997 and was shut down in 2000 after burning through $42 million without getting the job done. A new payroll system covering about one-third of county employees was installed, and the accounting system wasn't put into service at all.

A post-mortem study of the failed project found it was run by managers who had virtually no experience implementing a program of that magnitude, some departments didn't support it and software was customized at a high price.

Caroline Whalen, county program project manager, said the county has gone through the analysis of the failure "with a fine-tooth comb and checked off everything and said we're ready to go."

Determined not to repeat past errors, the county has set up a dizzying array of groups: a project leadership committee, an external advisory committee, a project review board, a capital-project oversight office, a management team, a committee to advise the team, and an operations and change-management committee.

With that level of review, Sims said last week, he's "absolutely" confident the renewed project will succeed. "We have to do it," he said.

Consultants estimate that benefits, resulting from efficiencies, will be worth three times the cost of installing the new computers.

But the county auditor's office has cautioned that those savings — made possible by eliminating 147 staff positions — won't be realized unless specific plans are made for slimming down the staff.

No one has questioned the need to replace computers installed before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.

But council members are cautious after what capital-budget Chairman Larry Phillips, D-Seattle, calls the "nightmare" of the first, failed attempt to do that.

Phillips said the executive has taken "a more careful and thoughtful approach" than he had a decade earlier. "But it's still a colossal amount of money, and I'm not sure that we've built in all the parameters to reduce risk," he said. "That's one of the reasons we're going slow: to see if there are some additional brakes we can put on this thing so we don't fall off the cliff again."

Councilmember Kathy Lambert, R-Redmond, said she is frustrated by the pace of the project — particularly the last piece, a budget system that will give council members direct access to budget data. "I'm concerned we could put a man on Mars before we could get our computers to work," she said.

The budget committees will resume deliberations on the computer systems today.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com