How Local Governments Got Hooked on Tyler Tech's Janky Software
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The product is a disparate hodge-podge of technologies. It's mostly written in an oddball application hosting framework called "Genero" from a company called "4Js". There are some off-the-shelf bits and pieces (various Apache-licensed libraries, Tomcat) for report generation. The data is hosted in Microsoft SQL Server.
The support teams are very focused on their silos and know nothing outside them. If you have an issue cross-cutting different parts of the product you'll have a terrible time with support. There's a lot of speculation on the part of the support team re: the causes of issues, and it appears that the support people have very little access to developers and no access to code.
The last major version upgrade had a >1 year timeline after it slipped repeatedly. Tyler seemed very under-staffed, which I felt like was margin-driven rather than because they couldn't find people. (Example: Half way thru the implementation key people changed positions in the company and new staff picked-up the project. It was clearly the first rodeo for some of the new people.)
It's not garbage software but it's not particularly good either. It's a lowest-common denominator kind of schlock that keeps Customers just happy enough not to look elsewhere. In terms of other vendors I've dealt with for the County it's by no means the worst. It's definitely not the worst technology stack (ask me about public safety software written in a mix of C from the early 90s, Perl from the late 90s, Win32 C from the early 2000's, Java from 2010's, and now C#-- all using a flat-file ISAM database for persistence that originated in the 1980s).
> Susie Thomas, a clerk for Lee County’s superior court, estimates it now takes her 10 times as many clicks to complete her case indexing. She was buried in scanning paper dockets for Odyssey’s online database until May 2024 and sorely misses the old DOS program. “It was a lot simpler and easier,” she says.
> A Tyler spokesperson says that ... its definition of “defect” is “not a ‘bug’ in the software, but something that didn’t work as anticipated.”
> Errors in the company’s apps have allegedly contributed to people getting stuck in prison for weeks longer than was ordered, or having incorrect verdicts entered on their records. Yet its products remain ubiquitous, in part because it has few serious competitors in the judicial space.