Nycaps and Citytime a Tale of Two New York City Is Projects

Introduction of Case

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his fortune in information technology, as the owner of Bloomberg L. P., a giant financial news and information services media company. Bloomberg assumed he could translate his success in modernizing information technology on Wall Street to modernizing New York City’s government, and he launched a series of projects to do just that. Two of those projects failed woefully. The NYCAPS and the CityTime system for pay roll related employee timekeeping have been fraught with cost overruns, mismanagement, and an overall failure to deliver an information system that has the capabilities sought by New York City government.

The goal of the project was to create a modern, automated system for managing and updating personnel information for New York City’s workforce, including employee benefit information. Personnel management was a prime target for a sweeping technological overhaul, since the city was using eight individual citywide systems, 200 systems within individual agencies, and a maze of paperwork for handling employee benefits and job changes. A timely and successful implementation of the NYCAPS project stood to save the city millions of dollars per year in labor and IT costs. To date, the implementation has been anything but timely, and the total expenditures of the project have grown to over $ 363 million, nearly six times the original budget.

State Problems

NYCAPS Project was mismanaged, cost overruns, and general waste plaguing the project, but the city continued ahead with the project without making any significant changes.

One of the report suggested that there was no sense of economy, efficiency, or value is evident in any area of the project.” These reports indicated that the primary reason for the project’s ballooning costs and myriad delays was lack of strong leadership.

The biggest problem was the idea of government officials who did not have the authority or expertise to make important...