Sources: Virginia’s IT chief ousted

Darn Yankee, Nice try for your agency but nobody is believing it.  This contract has been going on for almost 5 years now and nothing has gotten better.  They should have had the bugs worked out years ago if they knew what they were doing.
shj, the problem is the contract will never expire. SName one contract similiar to this that has.  No Northrup Grummun is fully entrenched in the IT infrastructure of the Commonwealth of Virgina and probably can never be removed.  It was bad enough when we just had VITA for a year before this contract came about due to a request by VITA not an out of the blue proposalby Northrup Grumann.

dogtown, you are misinformed. The incident at DHP had nothing to do with Stewart’s departure. In the first place, I don’t think that the experts have decided whether a compromise actually occurred.
One of the things that the partnership did was expose all of the hidden IT expenditures that state agencies were making. For example, the expenditures for IT staff were hidden in an agency’s personnel budget. Equipment purchases were hidden in the agencyies’ operations budgets. Services were purchased using money originally budgeted in different accounts, e.g., personnel budgets, that were not spent for the purposes originally budgeted. Agencies bought computers and peripheral equipement with so called “end of year funds;“ and so forth. When all of those expenditures are exposed to the light of day and aggregated, they appear to be excessive. There was no consolidated view of how much the Commonwealth was really spending on IT.
Were there errors?  Could the transition and transformation have been done better? Of course, but people need to remember that this is the first time something like this has been attempted on this scale. 
The Partnership is only in its third year.  All of the agencies have not yet been transformed, so the economies of scale and any cost savings that may result have yet to be realised. Remember, too, that the state’s IT infrastructure was woefully out of date, and the executive and legislative branches were not willing to put up the money to update it. Northrop Grumman brought the necessary capital investment to the table to modernise the state’s infrastructure. The monthly fees that the agencies are supposed to pay are intended to allow them to recoup their investment.
The contract with Northrop Grumman resulted from an unsolicited proposal that the company submitted under a law passed in 2002, the Public Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act. Contracting the services out was not “the brilliant idea idea of Warner and VITA,“ though Mr. Stewart, Mr. Warner or the ITIB could have put a stop to it at any point in the review process.

I see a lot of people are very misinformed about what has happened with this consolidation.  I think that is intentional on Lem Stewart’s part - he is a consummate snake oil salesman.

I agree that the consolidation was a good idea.  It should have increased efficiency, taken advantage of economies of scale, and eventually led to cost savings.  Unfortunately, the implementation by the VITA/NG Partnership was poorly run, whether intentionally by profit-seekers or simply incompetence in the planning or information gathering I don’t know.

Yes, state agencies have been resistant.  But the primary reason for that is because they are being asked to lower expectations of service and pay more for it.  Rather than looking at agency business needs and trying to meet them, the Partnership came up with a monolithic set of systems without a thorough understanding of requirements, then tried to shoe-horn every system into it.  The Partnership could have leveraged some of the best practices and talent that the larger agencies already had.  Instead agencies were forced to re-hire for positions that the Partnership absorbed in order to maintain support for systems that were abandoned or left “out-of-scope”.

And, yes, it was Warner that started this, not Gilmore.

One wonders whether the unauthorized access by hackers to the prescription drug tracking database might have been a contributing factor. As Chief IT Officer, Lem Steward clearly had senior level responsibility for seeing that the Commonwealth’s computer systems are maintained in a secure a state as possible. As I and many others commented when the unauthorized access was first reported, otherwise secure systems often are rendered insecure when short-cuts are taken to implement application or system changes when projects are dramatically behind-schedule and over-budget. There are credible reports being circulated that such may well have been the case.

Hey Good Shepard, just a little correction….Mr. Gilmore was governor that dreamed up the fabulous VITA… Mr. Warner inherited it as it was starting up….  Can’t even keep the phone book updated…come on guys!  We can do better than this!