Built on a service catalog of roughly sixteen hundred costed line items across applications, infrastructure, desktop and support, rolled into cost pools and distributed on explicit allocation bases — network ports in use, authorized positions, virtual and physical servers, remote sites, service desk tickets, mobile devices and subscriber radios.
The Customer Billing System behind it spans sixteen functional lanes — finance, budget office, PMO, operations and six technical operating units — and automates extraction from the systems of record that hold the truth: CiscoWorks for network ports, Lenel for badge access, Active Directory and LDAP for accounts, the CA service desk for tickets, Tivoli and Maximo for assets, Oracle Position Control for personnel. QA gates, an error-report loop back to asset managers and a hard annual inventory cut-off keep the counts defensible before a single bill is issued.
The model was benchmarked before it was designed: more than twenty-five cities and counties interviewed, narrowed to the Seattle and Tacoma models as the closest fit. Technology refresh was built into the rate rather than the capital cycle. Every agency’s charges and underlying asset detail were published to a customer-facing portal.
Half of it was reporting
The Customer Billing System rebuild is the one place the architecture hours and the business intelligence hours are counted side by side. Over three years and one month from September 2012 the program recorded 1,580.5 hours: 380 as enterprise architect, 408 from a second enterprise architect, 40 from the enterprise architecture manager, and 752.5 from a business intelligence developer on proof-of-concept reports and the full implementation. Those four were named at the time as the primary people on design, buildout and implementation, with ITD finance, project management, the operational areas, the Chief Information Officer and senior leadership team, and inventory recorded as indirect.
Close to half the build was reporting. A cost model is only as good as the thing that renders it to the customer, and the record says so in hours.
The model closed against the total budget rather than leaving a residue nobody owned, through a rate modifier spreading non-directly-attributable expense across billable labor hours. Every budget line carried a unique identifier and fiscal-year tag, which is what made year-over-year comparison and audit possible at all. It was introduced alongside parallel billing, so agencies could see the old and new models side by side before the new one became real money.
Public safety radio was modeled as its own allocation — P25 debt service, system maintenance, radio shop, tower costs and the JEA buyout, distributed across the subscriber fleet at published per-radio rates — billing out the same radio system this record architected.
Outcome
A bill nobody could be compelled to pay that agencies nonetheless paid, because they could see and challenge what they were charged for.