Oregon’s computers sending erroneous letters to jobless; they can't stop them
oregonlive.com
oregonlive.com
Call me cynical, but knowing how enterprise software vendors fool big corporations, I'm left wondering how bad the software is they manage to sell to state IT departments.
Whether this new software will even an improvement on the status quo is questionable at best.
I'm always thinking the state should instead spend money on open source solutions. They at least could be vetted by interested parties. And with the money the state hands to vendors they could finance some great development.
Competence flows accordingly.
To put it bluntly, government contracts under pay for the complications they provide, are never straightforward, have too many competing stakeholders, and huge changes will be required mid-way through every project.
On top of that, only certain companies that have been vetted and approved to be a vendor can even apply, which effectively weeds out most potential companies. What you wind up with is Oracle selling a one-size fits all “platform” to one state for DMV, and the next state for Electronic Medical Records.
Additionally, the FTE pay scale is shit compared to the private sector so they will never have any chance at getting, let alone retaining, any decent talent.
I’m not quite sure why state’s employment systems are so fantastically terrible given the relative simplicity of the task.
I have to imagine welfare, health care, and dare I say election systems don’t work much better.
For one they usually pick bad vendors, because they're big enough to have a license, not because they provide a well-designed solution.
But I think this is one of those tasks that looks simple from the outside but has many pitfalls. Bureaucratic systems are somewhat rule based usually, but since they weren't automated from the beginning, they usually have some conflicting rules, some missing rules, and some ambiguous rules. Which means there's a lot of human intuition involved in decision making which isn't encoded anywhere.
So to start creating a new software that is better you would first have to understand the old software + human decision-making.