The Plain Dealer Cleveland, OH CLUMSY COMPUTER COSTING COUNTY MILLIONS 09/12/2000

On the fourth floor of the old Sterling-Lindner Department Store on Euclid Ave., near the gallery where shoppers used to catch a look at the store's giant Christmas tree, a drab gray box is attracting fierce debate over how Cuyahoga County spends money and delivers services.

The refrigerator-sized box, a mainframe computer, served for years as the nerve center of the county's computer operations, located on two floors of the converted department store.

The mainframe stored and processed information on food stamps, marriage records, elections and dog licenses. Almost every county program had a berth in the gigabyte vault.

But today the lumbering mainframe is slowly being abandoned. Whole sectors of county government are moving their data into "client servers" that control independent networks of desktop personal computers.

Yet the mainframe and the department that runs it, the Information Services Center, are still costing taxpayers $15.6 million a year.

County officials say a stopgap attempt three years ago to deal with another, even slower county-owned mainframe included a decision to sign a lease for a new mainframe. That locked the county into high costs through 2002.

But the new system is proving unpopular with many county agencies as well.

"Somewhere down the line, someone didn't listen hard enough, and now it's too late," said Sam Mohammad, deputy chief in the recorder's office. "They're sitting there with all this antiquated equipment and it's hitting them squarely in the face."

Mohammad's boss, Recorder Patrick O'Malley, goes further, calling the data center "the biggest waster of money in the county, and everyone knows it."

The county established the data center in 1967 to centralize the county's computer systems and control computer purchases. Over the years, its budget and staff continued to grow until leveling off at around $16 million in 1997. The county now projects it will spend $16.1 million next year on the center's computers and its 122 technicians and administrators.

County Administrator Thomas Hayes acknowledges the center has sagged under the weight of years of neglect. When Hayes stepped in for a temporary 15-month stint as its director in 1997, he and other county officials said, the mainframe and software were maddeningly slow. They had served their purpose in earlier years, but gradually began collapsing onto themselves in the 1990s.

Agency heads and employees screamed about problems that included:

- Software that was not Y2K compliant.

- Disarray in the Department of Children and Family Services' case management, because the computer made it a struggle to combine information on which children and which families were receiving what assistance.

- Outdated programmer skills. Some employees didn't know the basics of the Windows operating system and had never worked on personal computers.

- A failure by previous administrators to take advantage of technological advances that allowed networks of desktop computers to do more efficiently what the mainframe was doing.

- A rapid and inadequately coordinated shift to personal computers in several agencies.

There were 1,600 PCs scattered among the county's employees in 1996; a year later, there were 6,500.

The decline was hastened by budget cuts after the county lost $115 million in the failure of the Secured Assets Fund Earnings program in 1994. The crisis left little money for employee training to stay abreast of evolving technology.

County commissioners responded with technological triage.

Rather than abandoning the sinking mainframe, they signed a lease- purchase agreement on a new one to buy time and get over the Y2K hump. They started buying software off the shelf instead of plowing money into training employees in software design.

Now, Hayes said, the county is playing catch-up, trying to upgrade its computer operations without bringing day-to-day business to a halt.

But during the modernization, he said, there will inevitably be unwieldy and costly overlap. Even though agencies are fleeing the mainframe, the cost of maintaining it will be essentially unchanged until it's unplugged. Hayes says that may happen by 2002.

For now, the mainframe continues to handle information for several agencies, including Common Pleas Court and the auditor.

"We can't shut the system down and build from the ground up," Hayes said. "These are people's lives you're dealing with.

"The difficulty with information systems is, things change so quickly, you're creating plans that are amended annually," he said. "I don't know if anyone short of the visionaries in Silicon Valley would have been able to predict what happened."

Hayes said the center's budget would start shrinking after next year as the county starts closing down the mainframe and reassigning its support personnel.

Said County Treasurer James Rokakis, who is seeking bids on a separate computer system for the treasurer's office: "I'll feel more comfortable when the functions that we rely on them for are under my control."

But the center's director, Joseph O'Malley, expects only $1.6 million in budget cuts, representing salaries and benefits of 29 programmers who were moved to other agencies this summer. Since the employees were reassigned, the county's overall computer budget did not decrease.

O'Malley, who is not related to the recorder, said the data center is branching into new areas: Developing a high-speed network that lets county agencies exchange information and setting up a countywide e-mail system. The center also invested in a robotic machine for storing computer tapes and has new IBM printers that spin out paychecks in a fraction of the time it used to take.

For PC users, Joseph O'Malley said, the advances are showing up on Web sites. The auditor's site, for example, has a database to locate the owner of any licensed stray dog.

Elsewhere, users can respond to a jury summons online or find the best gasoline price in the county.

He said the data center is indispensable for coordinating the evolution. Without a central coordinating agency, he said, these and other computer operations would be chaotic.

"You would have every agency doing what they wanted, with the county commissioners having no control over it," he said.

However, he said, the county may get out of the mainframe business. He expects to complete a proposal this month on what to do with its remaining operations. Possibilities include renting space on a private sector mainframe.

In the late 1990s, municipal and county governments considered hiring contractors to handle some or all of their computer records management to be the wave of the future.

Connecticut decided in 1998 to hire contractors, and San Diego County was getting ready to do the same.

The experiments, however, have had mixed results, and Cuyahoga County has not determined how much of its computer operations to spin off. When the county asked private firms about outsourcing, vendors said it should be an all-or-nothing deal - completely privatize or forget the plan. Any middle ground would be cumbersome, they said.

Joseph O'Malley said it would be a mistake to turn over everything to the private sector, but he is not clinging to the data center as a mainframe-based clearinghouse.

Yet Patrick O'Malley, the recorder, said the downsizing needs to be more drastic.

"They want to preserve the size of their budget and staff," he charged, "but there's been a lot of layoffs already and they need to do more."

-- FM (scipublic@aol.com), September 15, 2000