State Has Wasted Millions on Computer Systems, Report Says : Spending: Legislative analyst’s office blames mismanagement, delays, soaring costs and bureaucrats’ lack of expertise in complex technology.

State agencies, enamored with computer technology and its promise of streamlining government, have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on huge, complex systems that they had neither the knowledge nor the technical ability to manage, a new legislative report says.

Nearly a dozen multimillion-dollar projects have either failed or are seriously in trouble because there has been no effective system for overseeing and managing them, said the report by the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office.

“The net effect of these problems is an annual expenditure for information technology which is not producing an optimum return on the state’s investment,” the report said. “In many cases it’s not even producing a reasonably good return on investment.”

According to the legislative analyst’s office, projects in trouble face huge cost overruns--sometimes doubling or tripling the original costs--long delays in getting the systems up and running and, worst of all, an inability to function as their designers had planned.

Written by Bob Dell’Agostino, an information technology expert in the legislative analyst’s office, the 23-page document provides the first detailed overview of state government’s investment in computer technology.

It paints a generally critical picture of bureaucrats who invested vast sums in computer systems without knowing which systems were best for their needs and how to manage them once they were in place.

“The state’s had the cruise control on and the credit card out but no one’s had a road map when it comes to these purchases,” said Assemblywoman Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey). “This report really highlights the fact we need to use technology to restructure government and not just building a series of multimillion-dollar filing cabinets to store information.”

The report flagged 11 projects, representing a state investment over time of about $1.3 billion, which it said were now in trouble because of a lack of management expertise.

The largest is an $800-million Department of Social Services project designed to provide a statewide system for computerizing data on welfare cases. The report said the project, now scheduled to be implemented over a 12-year period, has been hampered by cost overruns and delays.

In the same department, an $80-million automated information system to be used by counties in administering child welfare services is three years behind schedule. Similarly, a computer system that was expected to provide a tool for law enforcement seeking parents who failed to pay child support has soared in costs from $140.8 million to $152.2 million and experienced “significant schedule slippage.”

The extreme example, and the one that has prompted both the analyst’s and the Legislature’s scrutiny of the state’s entire computer network, is a $44-million project undertaken by the Department of Motor Vehicles to coordinate driver’s license data with vehicle registration information.

The department has recently abandoned that much-delayed project after determining that it could not make it work without the expenditure of another $153 million.

The report takes to task Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration and its predecessors for providing insufficient oversight of computer projects and suggests several legislative actions to better control future computer purchases.

Wilson recently announced plans to appoint a task force on government technology policy and procurement to conduct its own examination of the state’s information systems. Appointments to the task force are expected to be announced soon.

The legislative analyst’s report criticized the Administration for the lack of an effective centralized management system and said it has left state agencies free to establish a helter-skelter network of systems that frequently do not interact and often duplicate one another’s work.

The report said the level of technical expertise varies widely from agency to agency and that many agencies that embark on large, complex projects lack the knowledge and experience needed to design, test and implement their systems.

“The long list of troubled and failed projects over the past 20 years offers mute testimony to this fact,” it said.

The problem is compounded because the Office of Information Technology, the state agency that has authority to review computer project proposals, often lacks the technical ability to determine whether a particular proposal is indeed the “most feasible and cost-effective solution,” the report said.

It recommended that the Legislature require the Administration to bar agencies that lack necessary technical expertise from initiating computer projects and that it set up a process for certifying those agencies that do have the ability to implement projects.