State accuses Northrop Grumman of breach

To Broughton55:  Nice ‘Tude Dude and you wonder why agencies are hesitant to cooperate.  Have you been involved with the RFS process?  If not, do a little research on how efficient your own bureaucracy is before criticizing the Commonwealth’s.  You are a service provider, yet you blame the customer.  You are providing what you want, not what your customer needs. Their primary job is to get the business of the agency done, not make transformation easy for you.
Like I said, nice ‘tude.

I have been following this news story with a chuckle since it broke and had no intention of commenting until reading the comments from this and other articles the last few days. I’ve been in what is now known as “IT” since the early ‘80s, thinking it was the “future”. I have worked for OEMs and third party service providers including NG. I even had the kiss of death title a few times, “Special Project Manager”. The truth be said, the NG-Vida thing is “Same ole, Same Ole” and nothing new! The NG/Vita story seems to be a classic example of the State following the private sector in allowing a “third party” entity to control of it’s technology interest. The scenerio seems to be playing out in every company over and over like a rerun of a bad movie with the ending always the same. Since the late ‘80 and early ‘90 corporations have outsourched their IT needs and hired “consulting firms” to run their IT shops to make the profit/loss numbers look good. The State needed some one to take control of their technology Blackhole. With an “IT consulting group” running the show those budget numbers can be hidden for a while as “non capital outlay” but those actual number and cost eventually rise to the top and must be explained. This is where the State is now. Let’s see! Vita acting as an umbrella for “some” of the States independent mismatched IT systems realizes it just can’t keep pace with the hardware-software changes happening to handle their employee users and customer needs. It’s just overwhelming. Bids are requested to take on this task. NG (substitute IBM/HP-EDS…etc) promises an IT land of “milk and honey” and makes a pitch to update, consolidate and fix the States IT systems. These consulting companies do no fact finding beyond writing a rehash of a previous bid for another company, substituting “Vita” where a previous companies name appeared. Vita takes the bait because they didn’t have to cough up anything they should have had on file like inventory, applications, operating systems and users info. NG hires various third parties to actually do the job…etc. Let the “Smoke and Mirrors” begin. Some where along the way both NG/HP/EDS and Vita fails to reach anything close to their goals and the blame game begins. Fire NG and another “Smoke and Mirror” consulting company takes over and repeats the same remedial process. It can be done but the State would have to take everything down and stop processing data for a few months. This Vida-NG mess sounds similar to the “Dead beat dads” system that never got off the ground a few years ago. The State needs to bite the bullet, hire their own IT employees and take back control of this monster.  I have yet to see an IT transition work. It’s mostly smoke and mirrors anyway with bandages and thumb tacks covering up the really bad parts. When it does seem to be working some executive gets paranoid, especially if he’s a decade or so from retirement or thinks his job is in trouble and removes IT company A for Company B and the “same ole same ole” begins again. Nothing new is happening with NG and Vita.

As it should be -

In response to your last question, the little secret is that many agencies/organizations are not part of the NG/VITA partnership.  The scope only includes “executive” agencies (those reporting to the governor), so legislative agencies like Workers Comp, and the courts are not covered.

The Universities escaped the partnership by being semi-autonomous.  While they do get some state money, the lions share of their funds come from fees and endowments which give them a greater say in how their IT is run - and so they chose not to join the partnership.

The same with the legislative and judicial agencies - they had a choice (executive agencies were mandated by the contract and law).  So far, no agency/organization that had the option to join has done so.

Exited - of the numerous comments in the many articles of late, yours is possibly one of the most well thought out.  As one of the “draftees” in this debacle, I can barely express my frustration with this project.  As staff escape the “partnership” we are squeezed to the breaking point because positions are not backfilled.  We are hammered by agency heads in vitriolic diatribes on the agency’s intranet, all the while trapped in the middle of unhappy users and the NG management epistles from on high.  All the while, we continue to bust our humps to do the best job possible, often in the same places, for the same people we’ve been supporting for years.  Even worse?  If we even try to show NG any loyalty by attempting to apply for positions in other sectors our job applications are rejected - IMMEDIATELY!  The current economy and state budget crunches leave us trapped like a mammoth in the tar pits.  There’s fault on both sides of this fence - the agencies often resist change of any kind and NG attempts to rubber stamp their solutions on everyone, painfully and sometimes detrimentally forcing square pegs into round holes to reach deadlines.  I can only hope that the light at the end of this tunnel isn’t a freight train.

This entire venture has not been about better management of state IT resources since the day it was voted into legislation.  It was about politics, plain and simple.  State employees were conscripted from their home agencies into VITA with no say whatever.  If your job profile fit the VITA model, you were drafted.  The process of integrating almost 90 agencies into VITA would have taken at least 5 years to do right.  Instead, it was forced into a year and a half.  The problems NG is having now were the same problems VITA started out with.

When NG came along, VITA employees were wooed with tales of great raises, superior training, and much improved opportunities, none of which have come to pass.  Lem Stewart was the biggest proponent of all for people to transition to Northrop Grumman.  He once said in an agency meeting to discuss the PPEA that if he was a state employee with the opportunity to go to Northrop, he would jump at it. 

NG promised they had systems and processes that would manage everything better, and they have been making it up as they go along since July 2006.  They are squeezing the remaining employees to work more and harder, and many IT service delivery employees have been working 60 and even 70 hour work weeks routinely. 

Anybody with common sense could look at the gargantuan task they were taking on and know it was not going to happen.  There were almost 50 separate transformation projects on the books.  Some have been completed, but rarely with satisfactory results to the customer agencies.  Negative comments were not appreciated, and realism had no place in the “partnership”.

Almost everyone still working there is looking for a new job, but in this economy IT jobs in Richmond are fewer and the competition is fierce.

This venture is a failure.  The sooner we have a General Assembly and Governor with the political will and nerve to state the obvious, the sooner this mess could start getting cleaned up.

But, in all likelihood that will never happen, and things will limp along until the contract runs out.