I had heard and just confirmed that our favorite runaway city project, Wild ERP, now has a new manager.
The mayor named Debra Bond to the post of director of the ERP initiative also known by its kitschy name OneSD. This, of course, is the effort to completely overhaul the city’s computer system. It was supposed to be completed by October of last year. The former comptroller, Greg Levin, had been the lead on the project, but he quit and left the city right after he and CFO Mary Lewis fired Axon, the consulting firm that was supposedly handling it all.
About 40 city employees are working full time on the project. Every day that they have to work on it longer than planned will mean that much more money they will have to spend in what may be an historically restrictive budget year.
Bond was a project manager at the San Diego Data Processing Corporation, or DPC. This is the quasi independent corporation that procures the city’s IT resources. She was brought over to the city by the guy apparently everyone inside City Hall thinks is a genius, the financial management director and acting CIO, Nader Tirandazi.
So they are apparently technical experts and smart about counting money. Cool.
“Nader was very enthusiastic about it and seems to have a lot of confidence that she’ll be great in the position,” Rachel Laing, the mayor’s spokeswoman, wrote me in an e-mail.
If Tirandazi and Bond get this project done, we won’t have to just take peoples’ words that they are geniuses.