One Project Ocean critic, former City Water Commissioner Kumar Kishinchand, said he never felt the project would work when it was discussed in 2002 and 2003. He left the commission in 2004 after 12 years.

"One reason is that they picked a company that had never done a water billing system," Kishinchand said yesterday. "Oracle had only done viable customer service systems with a small portion for billing purposes. Municipal billing systems tend to be tremendously complex."

The off-the-shelf components of such systems have to be heavily modified, a complex and time-consuming effort, he said.

He also argued that project managers "did not have much to lose if it failed," since the city's Finance Department would be in charge -- not the Water Department, which is the principal operator and user of the system. "The city's Water Department could have managed to tweak it to get it to work, because they had a compelling interest to get it to work."

He also said Neff and MOIS wanted to take over the water billing system -- which brings in $300 million a year in revenues -- because it was "the most complex and biggest" IT system in government. "Most of what went wrong had to do with empire building, more than anything else," he said, accusing officials of putting all their eggs in one [Oracle] basket, without consulting the water department."