Audit Report on the Development and Implementation of the New York City Housing Authority’s Improving Customer Experience Initiative

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is responsible for providing quality affordable housing for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in NYCHA’s public housing developments within the five boroughs. NYCHA also administers the Section 8 Leased Housing Program through which approximately 235,000 New Yorkers receive subsidized rental assistance in private homes.

In 2007, NYCHA launched a major multi-year NYCHA Improving the Customer Experience (NICE) project. NICE is an enterprise-wide information technology program aimed at improving customer service and automating business processes by replacing outdated department systems and manual processes. To accomplish its initiative, in 2007, NYCHA entered into a $42.4 million five-year contract with IBM Corp. to develop and implement NICE and to replace its legacy systems and automate its business process functions. Based on the contract, NICE was to be implemented in two major releases. Release 1, expected to be implemented in December 2008, would expand NYCHA’s Customer Call Center (CCC) capability and automate the function of the Maintenance Operations Department via the Maximo module and the inspection processes. Release 2, expected to be implemented in August 2009, primarily focused on automating manual processes and replacing outdated systems within the Leased Housing Department (LHD) and the Application and Tenancy Administration Department (ATAD).

Audit Findings and Conclusion

NICE is currently operational and has improved NYCHA’s customer service function and automated its business processes. However, NYCHA encountered problems during system development and implementation, which resulted in project delays. These delays occurred due in part to inadequate planning in designing business and system requirements, which resulted in the need for system redesign and enhancements. Further, despite NYCHA’s identified system improvements, it still has not fully implemented the online self-service capabilities to NYCHA tenants and applicants. System enhancements have also increased the NICE contract from $42.4 million to over $60 million.

Further, our review found NICE task log issues are unresolved. As of February 2013, there were 61 Maximo open issues and 109 high priority Siebel open items on the Task Log, which records system issues dealing with system performance. These open items include wrong work order priority levels and too many steps to close work orders. Some Siebel high priority issues indentified include the system freezing while creating service requests and a non-responsive toolbar when trying to answer a call.

In addition, we found access control weaknesses such as not disabling or deleting users who should not have access to the system. Three hundred and seventy-three Siebel users not employed at NYCHA still appeared on the current active user list.

Finally, the Siebel user satisfaction survey revealed that 44 percent of the users reported that the information displayed is not easy to work with, 19 percent of users felt that the data was often inaccurate, and 65 percent of the users stated they would like to see changes made to the system.

Audit Recommendations

This report makes a total of eight recommendations, including that NYCHA should:

• Ensure that business and system requirements are adequately defined for all future system developments.
• Monitor and ensure all future system developments and eService modules are properly completed on schedule.
• Monitor and ensure all issues reported on the Task Log are addressed and resolved.
• Conduct periodic surveys to ensure that user concerns are promptly addressed.
• Establish and promote feedback facility to track and monitor user satisfaction.
• Ensure user access is given only to essential users.
• Periodically review the status of inactive user accounts.
• Establish the proper controls to ensure that once employees are no longer employed with NYCHA, their access to Siebel is immediately removed.

NYCHA Response

In their response, NYCHA officials agreed with four recommendations and partially agreed with four recommendations.