Posted on Fri, Mar. 08, 2002 TX - City computer system flawed By Tanya Eiserer Star-Telegram Staff Writer

ARLINGTON - The city of Arlington has learned a lesson about installing new information systems: Try to avoid being first.

Two and a half years after the computer-aided dispatch, police, fire and jail records management systems came on line, they still have major glitches, said officer Larry Barclay, the Police Department's research and development manager.

The $4.8 million system experiences frequent slowdowns and failures, Barclay said. Sometimes incident reports written in one part of the system don't show up in another part as they are supposed to, Barclay said.

"They can't explain that," Barclay said. "I can't explain that. It's not very comforting to think that can occur."

Assistant Chief Larry Boyd said it's a "fragile system" that should have been stabilized by now.

The system was installed by Tiburon, a company based in Fremont, Calif., that bills itself as the "world leader in public safety and justice information systems." Chief Executive Officer Bruce Kelling has promised his company will find a way to resolve the problems.

But in spite of the headaches, Tiburon is far superior to anything the department previously had, Boyd said. For example, officers and supervisors can get detailed crime analysis that would have been unheard of before, he said.

"It is a powerful system that provides a lot of information for officers and supervisors," Boyd said.

Problems from the start

When the city chose Tiburon in 1995, the revolution from text-based systems to Windows-based systems was in its infancy. And the city couldn't wait, because its mid-1980s-era dispatch system was on its last legs, said Gary Robertson, Arlington's director of support services.

Tiburon offered to charge the city the price of an older text-based system but give it the Windows-based system that was then in development, city officials said.

"It was either sit there and wait three or four or five years to have that product" or take the deal, Robertson said.

The project was a monumental task because it meant bringing the police and fire departments out of a veritable computer Stone Age. In police facilities, about 350 computer work stations were installed, when before there had only been about 35.

But the fire, police and jail records management systems didn't work when they arrived, city officials said.

Janice Williams, the Fire Department's administrative services manager, said the problems with the fire system were easier to fix because the system is less complex.

In the case of the police and jail records systems, Barclay said, "It took us over a year of our time to find the bugs, report them and then constantly test and retest to assure that it was working the way it should."

Barclay said he believes Tiburon did not fully test the systems before delivery. He said programming fixes in one area often caused unanticipated problems elsewhere.

The original project was scheduled to take about a year to install, but instead it took about four years to get police records fully operational, Barclay said.

"It was way, way behind schedule," Barclay said. "We went through four project managers. We finally ended up with a vice president of the company being our project manager."

Barclay said the Police Department trained about 500 employees to operate the new system in the summer of 1998. But because it took so long to come online, the employees had to be retrained the next year.

The police and jail records systems didn't go online until September 1999, he said.

Robertson said some of what Arlington experienced with Tiburon could be expected, but "this took longer than anybody anticipated."

Tiburon's Kelling said there could have been better testing of the system. But he added, "If you waited until it was 100 percent de-bugged, it would be obsolete before you could deliver it."

He said, however, agencies such as Arlington drove technology forward.

"I'm glad they did what they did," Kelling said. "They benefited the whole industry."

Today, about 30 criminal justice agencies, including North Richland Hills, have installed systems similar to Arlington's, Kelling said.

In Arlington, the Tiburon experience has city officials saying they will not be technology guinea pigs again. Officials said the city will only buy off-the-shelf software that does not require major customization.

"There's an old saying that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want," Barclay said. "We have a lot of experience."

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