Published on the 02/03/2016 | Written by Clare Coulson

With more than 20-years’ ICT industry experience under her belt, Victoria Crone has not pulled her punches when criticising Auckland Council’s IT expenditure over the past five years…

The New Zealand Herald reported this week that the Super City has spent $1.24 billion on IT since it was formed in 2010. That’s all well and good, if you have the results to show for it, but Crone doesn’t think Auckland Council has delivered the results it should have, labelling the project a shambles.

Speaking to iStart, Crone, who stepped down as managing director of Xero to throw her hat in the mayoral ring, said there is not a lot of publically available information in terms of actual savings that have been achieved and that the level of reporting and governance around the IT spend “is really, really weak”. Crone agrees that an investment had to be made in order to bring together the disparate technology systems of the eight separate council entities that were combined to form the Super City, however she made it clear she believes the level of expenditure is “quite astounding and way beyond anything that we would expect in the private sector”.

“The fact that Council is attempting to combine systems is an inaccurate justification for this level of investment,” she wrote in a strongly-worded blog post; published this week on her mayoral campaign website.

She told iStart that this is not just a failure of governance but also of the people in council who are running these projects and programmes: “$1.2 billion! We should expect a lot out of that type of investment,” she said.

“I would have totally transformed all of my information systems and taken the entire organisation into modern-based computing systems (so everything on cloud for example). I could probably have built a mobile network for that money, or at least expected a significant infrastructure project to come out of it. We are not seeing that, instead we are just seeing snippets of a few registrations processes online. We cannot afford to waste resources.”

The excesses of Super City IT spend is nothing new. iStart interviewed the Council’s CEO, CFO and CIO on the subject back in 2012, at which stage there had been a $230 million extension to budget projections up to $500 million over a 10 year period. Messrs McKay, McKenzie and Foley are no longer in their roles.

Crone is not alone in criticising the Council’s spending on technology projects. Last year the Auditor General Lyn Provost raised serious concerns about the governance relating to the New Core project which is the central project designed to unite Auckland’s four cities on a single platform and, in doing so, bring huge cost savings to the city.  At the time of her report, Provost told the New Zealand Herald that a $157 million Super City computer system has a potentially “catastrophic” risk. The Council, however, assured her that all was in hand.

Crone, who has perused the minutes of the meetings relating to the technology project, disagrees. She said she was shocked but not surprised to find “just how badly our leaders have failed us in governance”.

“Having worked in the IT and communications sector in senior management and governance positions during my 20 years in business, I have never seen such gross negligence at all levels of project management,” she blasted on her blog, calling for heads to roll.

Local and central government technology projects have a long history of going off the rails, but there are success stories. Crone says the leaders of the IRD’s $1.5 billion transformation project have “worked cleverly with their providers and the private sector” (including Xero) and are an excellent example of how a government body can partner with business.

Crone is promising to be a breath of fresh air and to bring fresh thinking to Auckland’s Super City should she be successful in the mayoral elections.