VITA contract is six months late, says official

This article is filled with misleading statements, and in some cases, outright lies.  Clearly Shapiro and the RTD editors have an axe to grind, since they certainly aren’t reporting the facts.  Let’s take a look:

1. Virginia’s computer agency is six months behind schedule in putting in place a $2.3 billion contract with Northrop Grumman for info-tech services.

False. The contract has been in effect since November 2005, and has brought 433 new high-tech jobs to southwest Virginia and 631 jobs to Chesterfield County. Overall, it will result in a $270 million capital investment in the stae.  The partnership is, however, approximately six months behind schedule on its current milestone.  But the vast majority of these delays can be directly attributed to state agencies underestimating their infrastructure needs.

2. Leonard M. “Len” Pomata, acting head of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, disclosed the delay yesterday in the opening of House of Delegates and state Senate inquiries into the controversy engulfing the sprawling department.

False.  The six month delay was announced in a January 2009 public session of the IT Investment Board. Representatives of both the House and Senate were in attendance.

In addition, VITA-NG is not sprawling by any means. It is not in the top 5 state agencies by either staff headcount or budget.

3. Pomata, installed when the previous chief information officer, Lemuel C. “Lem” Stewart Jr., was fired as CIO for questioning a monthly, $14.3 million bill from Northrop Grumman, said it now will be Christmas before the state’s new, privately run IT management plan is implemented fully.

False.  The state does not in any way, shape, or form have a ‘privately run IT management plan’. VITA is a state agency. Northrop Grumman is a contractor, of which the state has many. It is important to note that the VITA-Northrop Grumman partnership accounts for less than 40% of the state’s annual IT spending: state agencies control the other 60%.

4. Illustrative of discontent with the VITA-Northrop Grumman deal: continuing concern over the recent hacking of drug-prescription records in the Department of Health Professions.

This is a troubling statement: in essence a bald-faced lie.  The DHP systems that were hacked were not included in the VITA-Northrop Grumman deal—they are DHP’s responsibility, run on DHP’s systems at the DHP facility.

In summary, I would caution readers on two accounts.

One, clearly the RTD staff cannot be fully trusted to factually report on this subject of the VITA-Northrop Grumman partnership.

Two, many of the user comments clearly come from disgruntled state IT staffers who were incapable of effectively managing the state’s IT resources prior to the VITA-Northrop Grumman partnership. Look up the facts if you don’t believe me—the state was suffering from massively losses related to IT spending, and had nothing to show for it but an aging infrastructure and an aging, inflexible IT workforce.  VITA didn’t spring up out of nowhere: it was created by the General Assembly and the heads of Virginia’s largest agencies as a means of improving infrastructure, workforce management, and ultimately citizen services.  These goals are being accomplished—do your research and find out for yourself what is really going on.

My agency has conducted no less than three inventories of computer equipment. Each had the oversight of upper management. Can you imagine the loss in productivity for a state agency’s mission, i.e. provding services to citizens.
I used to work in the private sector servicing computers in the 1970’s, all I can say is that DMAS and is sucessor, DIT was a real joke. Those state agencies connected to the mainframe would get droped off the system and it took forever to log back in for a simple query of their database. Centralization of the state’s data onto remote servers is asking for trouble. Just wait until a major phone line is accidentally cut and the state’s work comes to a halt.

As one who spent most of his career in banking and finance including 25 years in the areas of IT application development, database management, and system software technical support culminating with nearly 10 years reviewing complex, nationwide computer computer facilities and data communications networks, I am well aware of all the pitfalls inherent in project of the magnitude of that outsourced to Northrop-Grumman.

For “educatericmond’s” edification, I have observed and verified situations in which the well-known large-scale vendor to whom work was outsourced, creating beautiful documentation to impress and fool management only to have competent IT auditors discover there the documentation portrayed personnel, equipment, and facilities which did not exist. IT contractors, like many in other industries, should not be assumed to be doing the job correctly - they should be subject to close scrutiny, careful oversight and management, and absolute accountability. Many organization run aground it IT projects because of ill-defined and constantly changing requirements AND the assuming everything is ok until a train wreck occurs as has happened with VITA/NG. 

Clearly the Northrop-Grumann fiasco is attributable to the absolute failure of all those responsible from Kaine on down the chain of command to adequately supervise, verify, and hold NG accountable.

Unless the contract was poorly drafted, which, unfortunately, may be the case, those who negotiated it and approved its signing on behalf of the Commonwealth should have included measurable performance standards, measurable service levels, and penalties for failure of the contractor to deliver services as provided in the contract.

Given the uncertainty, it would seem prudent for the Attorney General, as the Commonwealth’s lawyer, to closely scrutinize the contract, obtain expert outside legal assistance if necessary, and exercise every legal avenue available to endure Northrop-Grumann complies with the contract or is appropriate penalized as permitted by applicable law.

I suspect Northrop-Grumman, through its massive and expensive network of lobbyists, is actively threatening retaliation if any adverse action is taken.

NG was brought in because the management of VITA, the agency created to manage the state’s infrastructure, never tried to do it themselves.  They were created, took some of the best of the agency IT staffs and then immediately outsourced, because this is all they knew how to do from previous careers as consultants.  No one at the top were actual workers, just “idea men”, consultants who never had to implement their ideas.  There is a reason why other states have not done this before, it doesn’t work.  And anyone who says that the state IT employees weren’t getting the job done have not done their homework.  Many agencies were doing very well technology-wise, but VITA decided to throw out the good with the bad.  Most agencies doing well were perfectly happy to assist less technology advanced agencies as best as possible within funding limitations.  Most agencies doing well had top-notch technology, despite extremely tight budgets.  Most agencies doing well would have been happy to share their best practices with VITA nd the other agencies.  Instead they were basically told that they knew nothing and their input was not welcome.  A huge issue for most agencies was lack of funds for IT, not lack of talented, knowledgeable staff.  If agencies had been given even half of what NG is getting, they would have been much better off.  They were totally underfunded, and now the state is forced to fund IT through this contract.  And that money is coming out of the general fund budget, and being passed to agencies who then pass it through to VITA.  There are no savings paying for this.  VITA never accurately determined how much the state was paying previously, so they guessed, and guessed way too high, and that is how the amount NG gets was determined.  And by the way, NG gets paid no matter what.  $230M/year.  If it had anything to do with milestones, they wouldn’t have received most of it, not just a piddling $13M held back.  And to blame employees for being resistant to change is a total copout.  Agencies have no choice and no IT staff in any position to resist the change.  NG owns everything.  That’s right, equipment purchased even before the NG contract is the property of NG.  They own all the infrastructure and control all access.  There is no way any employees “resistant to change” can stop them from doing whatever they want.  Their problems aren’t the fault of state workers; their problems are self-created by hiring incompetent pay-as-you-go contractors and having incredibly bad communications skills both internally and with their customers.  They never cared about the fact that not all agencies are the same - they have different needs, needs which NG never attempted to figure out when they sent their hired nincompoops to install systems at agencies.  Their different workgroup silos don’t communicate at all.  They were totally unprepared for the scope of what this contract required.  Perhaps IBM should have been awarded the contract.  Or perhaps VITA management should have done their homework and learned their customers needs and what each agency actually did and why before determining that this was the best course of action.  And the General Assembly is not blameless either.  They created VITA but didn’t fund the agency.  They also managed to exempt their own legislative IT from VITA management and control, and also from the NG contract.  That’s right, the GA IT staff is independent of this contract.  If this is such a great idea, why are they not participating?  Perhaps if the General Assembly had a stake in it and had to deal with the problems agencies deal with every day, they would have shown more concern before now.  It is amazing that it took a newspaper story to get their attention during an election year.

I doubt the VITA employees are any better or worse to deal with than any other group that’s been taken over by an outsourcer. That’s what NG does for a living; they should be experts.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter who brought NG in…who got political favors…that all just makes it more difficult to see what’s going on.

My interest is not in bringing NG to “this area” because if they bring inefficiency then we’re not really getting much for their money.

Revisiting why the State entered into this agreement will do nothing to solve it. We need NG to live up to the contract that THEY entered into or throw in the towel…