Garbage in, garbage out

At an ibm team-building exercise, executives were instructed to tell three things about themselves, one of them a lie. One participant said:

"I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.

"I pitched the first ball at a Padres game.

"I oversaw the smooth implementation of SAP software."

His colleagues laughed; they knew right away which was untrue. Most big new software programs cause big headaches at first. But software by the German company SAP is known as a particularly balky, if useful, tool for payroll, billing and other financial matters.

The Irish Health Service spent eight years and 12 times more money than budgeted before calling a halt to its attempt to install SAP software customized by Deloitte Consulting. That was in 2005, just as the Los Angeles Unified School District was moving ahead on SAP, also customized by Deloitte.

The contract was just the first of the district's mistakes.

One year ago this month, the new software began generating thousands of wildly inaccurate paychecks -- 32,000 in June alone -- especially to teachers. Some received a fraction of what they were owed; others were grossly overpaid. Teachers camped out for entire days at district headquarters while a special office tried to solve their problems. Money and many thousands of hours of instructional time were lost.

At least that part is over. Almost all teachers are receiving the right amounts now, although it still takes an army of district employees to backstop the software.

The payroll debacle was a textbook case of the inefficiencies that perennially plague the L.A. school district -- a paucity of talented managers, a lack of responsiveness and a stultifying bureaucracy. Turnover among the top ranks meant the district lacked the expertise to oversee the $95-million contract. Lower-level tech people were undertrained, and many were underqualified but could not be replaced because of union contracts. The district's pay system is impossibly byzantine, with each of nine unions having its own pay structure. Employees might be paid by the hour, the week, the task or even in six-minute increments. And in the beginning, bureaucrats in the central office were remarkably indifferent to teachers who faced financial calamity, transferring them, disconnecting them, failing to return their calls.