Courts' $3m blowout

By RICHARD WOOD

The Department for Courts expects cost overruns for its delayed Case Management System to reach almost $3 million.

The system was expected to cost $12.365 million, but the budget has ballooned to $15.225 million. At July 31, $11.362 million had been spent.

The Herald has also uncovered the cost of a major IT infrastructure project that has been vital for the department's $82 million modernisation programme - of which $74 million had been spent at the end of July.

The infrastructure project began in September 1998 and has cost $17.95 million so far from an original budget of $18.765 million. It will be completed with the CMS system, which is due to go live in increments from next month.

The information was supplied to the Herald last week after Official Information Act requests and a complaint to the Ombudsmen. The department has now been made to release specific key details of its four most significant IT projects.

The Case Management System uses services firm Datacom.

The department said the project began in May last year and was due to be rolled out from June.

It ran into difficulties which the department puts down to the size of the project, the complexity of its interfaces with other Government systems and a design change to deal with infringements.

When operating, the system will allow the department to stop using the Law Enforcement System on the "Wanganui" police computer, and it expects to save $2.087 million a year as a result.

If it is not complete by the end of the year, the department will have to continue paying IT firm EDS for the use of the Law Enforcement System.

Another project that has suffered delays is the Collect project, which also went beyond its original budget of $12.965 million to $13.618 million.

Interface complexity is blamed for the delay of the launch date from June last year to December last year. Those delays are blamed for the additional costs.

Prime contractor Accenture was penalised for the lateness of the Collect project. The amount of that penalty has not been disclosed, but a department official said it would already have been deducted from the cost of the project.

The purpose of the Collect system is to increase the productivity and efficiency of fines collection and it is another project that takes a load off the Wanganui computer.

The IT infrastructure project was mentioned but not detailed in interviews in May, when it was revealed that Accenture received $32.4 million over six years for a range of work.

This included process redesign, systems design, project management, IT strategy and implementation.

The $18.765 million IT infrastructure project, as now described, began in September 1998 and is nearing completion.

It included the establishment of a wide area network linking all courts in the country, PC and notebook computer purchases, the building of local area networks, a new PABX system, email systems, internet and intranet.

The department described itself as having begun with a "low technology base".

The other project for which details have been made available is the Maori Land Information System, designed for the Maori Land Court. This completed system was budgeted at $6.34 million and cost $5.98 million.

It includes a nationwide database of all Maori land title and ownership and an imaging enhancement to record paper records.

The project began in March 1999 and was completed in January. Five million pages of historical records have been scanned in.

Courts is also facing software cost increases of up to $1.5 million a year starting next September as a result of Microsoft's new licensing regime. The department is one of a group of Government agencies trying to negotiate a lower pricing agreement.