Is $12.6 million computer system a cover-up for a mistake?

As the Kane County Board considers spending $12.6 million on a new computer system for its judicial and public safety functions, a deeper question may be how the current system became virtually useless in the first place.

The makers of the current system believe taxpayers are being asked to pay to correct decisions made five years ago that may have snowballed into a multimillion-dollar mistake. County officials say they need the money now to fix a system with programming that’s near extinction and never worked well to begin with.

Kane County installed the program that serves as the backbone for information flow in its court system in 2002. It was created by Mississippi-based JANO Justice Systems. Nearly 10 years later, the only branch of the county’s court system that gets any productive use out of it is Circuit Court Clerk Deb Seyller’s office.

Criminal data are spread across 100 files in more than 120 directories. There are only a few people in the county who even know how to pull reports from the system for the state’s attorneys, judges and court services personnel to use them.

The delays in pulling information, to use one example, can stall getting orders of protection out to the law enforcement agencies who enforce them by up to two days. Chief Judge F. Keith Brown said he can’t even get a true feel for how many cases the county’s judges are handling, or how quickly they are disposing of them, to get accurate reimbursements back from the state on certain costs.

Kane County must be able to handle more cases with fewer people wasting time on tasks like duplicative manual data entry, Brown said.

“We are unable to pull the data that we need on a daily basis to run an efficient system in an accurate and reliable manner,” Brown said. “We’re wasting money.”

A report created by a county consultant agrees with that assessment. It says the county must spend $5.9 million during the next five years on system enhancements, support staff and leasing contracts just to maintain the current mess.

Vasco Bridges is fuming that JANO, which has offices in Springfield, is implicated as the source of that mess. Bridges is the CEO and co-founder of JANO.

Bridges sent all county board members a letter last week that said the reason the system isn’t working is because Seyller not only failed to maintain the system, but altered it in ways that have apparently made it dysfunctional.

“The system the county board is analyzing isn’t even a 2006 version of what we created for them,” Bridges said. “Deb Seyller sent us a letter back in 2006 essentially canceling our maintenance of the system and locking us out. The stuff they are complaining about not being able to do is pretty basic stuff. My understanding is they’ve made a ton of changes to the system over the last five years to the extent that they don’t have a JANO system today. The responsibility of what doesn’t work today rests with those who modified our codes.”

All the maintenance and modification of the system occurs within Seyller’s office. Seyller has her own information technology team and support from the county’s overall computer operations department. The director of that department, Roger Fahnestock, told county board members last week that maintenance of the system barely exists.

“The biggest problem is the maintenance and the ongoing support and service of the current system,” Fahnestock said. “Its current status with maintenance contracts is the maintenance is either not being executed or not being there to begin with. So you’re dependent upon people who didn’t develop the original product to make changes.”

Seyller said it takes so much time and money to maintain the current system because it was never a great product in the first place. She said the problems began with transitioning Kane County to JANO’s system, not with foregoing JANO’s upgrades.

“The conversation of data from the previous system to the current was horrendous and continues to cause us to do cleanups on the data,” Seyller said in an email interview. “Every patch and upgrade installed under maintenance blew up something else somewhere in the software.”

That’s why Seyller ended the county’s relationship with JANO after the first four years.

“How many years should one wait for a vendor to exhibit reliable maintenance and support?” Seyller said.

Bridges points to several other counties, including Kendall and DeKalb, that use JANO without a hitch for the proof of his product’s quality. In fact, he estimates JANO can provide a system that solves all of Kane County’s problems for $3 million less than the current maintenance costs.

But while Brown agreed other counties, even those he oversees as chief judge of the 16th Judicial Circuit, still use JANO successfully for their needs, he said Kane County is much bigger and busier.

“Our current product goes back to 2002, and the way it was configured is not in touch with what we need in today’s environment,” Brown said. “I am unaware that JANO has a product that can fix it.”

Seyller said she is aware of JANO’s latest product, and she still doesn’t think JANO can fix things.

“We have watched the upgrades provided and have attended a couple of their user groups,” Seyller said. “Nothing offered as an advancement was worth the battles over system security, unauthorized use of data and other issues that existed.”

It likely will be several more weeks before county board members will make a decision on whether to buy a whole new system. It will probably be several months before board members must lock in a way to pay for the $12.6 million upgrade.

Kane County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay has suggested funneling money already being collected through the public safety sales tax into paying for the project. But some board members have expressed sticker shock over spending $12.6 million during a down economy and an otherwise slimmed down budget. None of them have publicly asked how the current system fell apart.