What is wrong with Colorado?



  • Colorado just reformed its IT organization by giving more responsibility to the state's CIO.  Will this be enough to stop the history of less than stellar performance? 

    Broken Voter Registration Database, Unemployment Insurance, Vehicle Registration, Benefits Management System, and an ERP System.

    What is wrong with Colorado? 



  • @davidyorke said:

    What is wrong with Colorado? 

     

     

    God bless america 



  •  

    * CBMS mistakenly cuts Teddy Rivera, of Denver, from food stamps, and he and his family have nothing to eat but a food bank's emergency three-day supply.

     Wow...that's just so wrong.  What idiot didn't test properly?

    Moreno said that during the mock election, testers had problems with the screen whiting out for half a minute at a time while checking in a voter.

    Is it just me, or does anyone who's been reading this site for a while immediately imagine a backend where it fetches all however-many-hundred-thousand records at once, transmitted over some kind of slow serial connection from an MS Access database server, and then does a string comparison on them one by one to find the right one, or something equally stupid?



  • CBMS was rushed into production to replace several rickety legacy systems that were decades old (and obviously built in an era when things lasted) that IIRC, was no longer capable of the volume and complexity of welfare benefits, especially in the post-Ginrich era. 

    @burntfuse said:

    Is it just me, or does anyone who's been reading this site for a while immediately imagine a backend where it fetches all however-many-hundred-thousand records at once, transmitted over some kind of slow serial connection from an MS Access database server, and then does a string comparison on them one by one to find the right one, or something equally stupid?
     

    That's almost exactly what I thought.  As a minty-fresh MSIT grad, I'm so happy that I found this site.  It teaches the one subject they don't cover in school, what NOT to do.  Although I have to give credit to Prof. McCubbrey at DU for bringing up these types of "processes" as excellent counter-examples.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @davidyorke said:

    [...] several rickety legacy systems that were decades old (and obviously built in an era when things lasted) that IIRC, was no longer capable of the volume and complexity of welfare benefits, especially in the post-Ginrich era. 
    And they replaced it with... a system that isn't capable of the volume and complexity of welfare benefits.



  • @davidyorke said:

    especially in the post-Ginrich era. 
    Am I the only one who read this "post-Grinch era" and wondered who he was referring to as the Grinch?



  • @davidyorke said:

    What is wrong with Colorado? 
    It's the thin air. Not enough oxygen to the brain.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    Am I the only one who read this "post-Grinch era" and wondered who he was referring to as the Grinch?

     

    No.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @davidyorke said:
    especially in the post-Ginrich era. 
    Am I the only one who read this "post-Grinch era" and wondered who he was referring to as the Grinch?
     

    TRWTF is that I read that as Gingrich and moved on until your post snapped me out of it. 



  • I hope someone got fired / unelected after that lot of fiascos. It's amazing the amount of waste going on, and how was the CIO not put in charge of the IT staff from day 1? Who was in charge?



  • @mxsscott said:

    I hope someone got fired / unelected after that lot of fiascos. It's amazing the amount of waste going on, and how was the CIO not put in charge of the IT staff from day 1? Who was in charge?

     

     IIRC, it was handled by the CIO for the state welfare department who reported to the Head of the welfare department, not the CIO for the state governement.  Technology services were much more de-centralized at the time.  I believe the sitting governor was term-limited so there wasn't a whole lot of political pressure to get it right. 

     There is now a new state CIO who has more authority over things.  He's stated he wants to consolidate a lot of services and resources (a la HP).



  •  It's all the barely-prevented alien invasions.



  • @mxsscott said:

    I hope someone got fired / unelected after that lot of fiascos. It's amazing the amount of waste going on, and how was the CIO not put in charge of the IT staff from day 1? Who was in charge?

     

    Reminded me of my first Developer job out of college working for a state-run hospital. The CIO reported to the CFO (a major assbutthat), who decided that the IT Department's budget should be grouped with Food Services, Janitorial Services and Laundry Services. So, once that "section" of the budget was decided, we had to compete with those services to get our share of the pie. The second year I was there, we did not have enough money to buy any new equipment and IT Operations had to constantly try to recycle old out-of-date equipment to working order. Needless to say the whole fiasco came to a head and the CEO's solution was to... no joke... fire the CIO. I left the sinking ship soon thereafter.



  • @davidyorke said:

    Colorado just reformed its IT organization by giving more responsibility to the state's CIO.  Will this be enough to stop the history of less than stellar performance? 

    Broken Voter Registration Database, Unemployment Insurance, Vehicle Registration, Benefits Management System, and an ERP System.

    Attempting to fix problems caused by an incompetent bureacracy by creating a new government bureau is a WTF.

     

    @davidyorke said:


    What is wrong with Colorado? 

     

    The state of Colorado is a typical government employer- instead of an at-will merit-based system we have a classification system that rewards seniority instead of value.  Directors are rewarded for justifying bigger budgets, and punished for running their department like a business.  This will never change, as it is impossible to get elected in a state election without the support of the government employees ("don't touch our pension and classification system!").  Don't forget that many of us will be unionizing soon- not only will a suggestion of touching this system make a politician unelectable, it will also result in organized labor strikes. 

     

    As a classified employee, my reward for hard work is more work, and the only way the people who get things done will ever get a decent raise is by leaving.  Leadership tends to be made up purely of government politicians who have no experience in large-scale IT projects.  The press doesn't report on our successes or compare our failed projects with our successful projects (and who has managed them) - instead they interview some politician who explains that a vendor's contractors didn't complete the work he was tasked with.


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