Neff said her office was involved in choosing the Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning E-Business suite for an array of city uses, including human resources, and said the Finance Department decided to make water billing its first application. Once that decision was made, MOIS was brought in to implement the move. "Hindsight is 20/20 and ERP is difficult anyway," Neff said.

Instead of water billing, HR ERP is the application most organizations start with because it is "fairly well defined in the industry with lots of productivity." As for the water billing system, "it was a big system, very complicated, with very unique features," Neff said.

Another problem was that it was designed to be run by multiple city departments and there was constant turnover among executive sponsors, Neff said. "Continuity was a problem and we could have had a better defined business processes. Problems came up between the contractor and business people. As we put it, it was a project that 'washed ashore'" for IT to handle.

The first finance director involved in Project Ocean, Janice Davis, left Philadelphia to become chief financial officer for Atlanta in August 2004. Reached in Atlanta, Davis responded to Kishinchand's critique, saying, "there was no effort on anyone's part to build an empire, only to upgrade the system."

A year ago, MOIS was appointed to analyze the work done so far, leading to a halt in the project and the suspension of several consultants, including Oracle employees and at least one private contractor, Jeanette Foxworth of New Orleans, Neff said. Foxworth has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Connecticut on unreleated charges of paying a Connecticut state senator $3,000 to help her win consulting contracts. She has pleaded innocent and faces trial in November, according a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut.