Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

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Holy shit, I had not seen this information previously.

So it looks like Oracle (through a roundabout arrangement with Dell) was on price agreement and they entered into a time & materials contract with Oracle and paid them via POs. Jesus christ on a cracker. Now I wonder if the Legislature had to approve OHAs limitation like they did with my Agency? In other words, we had to get permission from the Legislature to spend our own money (outside of normal operating costs).

I had to budget my big IT expenses before each biennium and wrap them up into Policy Option Packages that then got presented to the Legislature to get approval to implement them. Yes, this was for things like new servers, hyper-v, etc.

What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars. That means that each PO was over 3 Million dollars (provided it was divided up evenly between each PO). Was there no chain of accountability on these POs? Who approved them? Who had oversight on this process?

"What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars."

Actually since you mentioned it:

"The purchase orders state that the purchase had to be split across multiple POs due to ADPICS controls. OHA explained that this was due to limitation on the authority of the OHA purchaser entering the POs into the ADPICS procurement system."

So they had to split the POs up to get them past the business rules implemented in their accounting platform? Heh.

(http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs/co_assessment.pdf page 36)

So reading these findings is kind of enlightening. As a former Manager with the State of Oregon, the lines about competing priorities really resonates with me. DAS (Dept. of Administrative Services) was tasked at one point with unifying IT and related services throughout the state, which basically forced them to look at the state as one entire enterprise. Good in theory, not so good in practice. I think what has proven to be true, is that each Agency has very different needs and wants with regards to IT and projects that fall into that realm.

The report goes on to mention that "the project seemed to lack a consistent, cohesive enterprise approach to managing the project." This sounds like DAS wrote this. It goes on to say, "The focus was on establishing an enterprise solution for the exchange and for the DHS Modernization project.". Again it sounds like DAS wrote this.

A key component (I think) that screwed the process was not keying vendor payment to deliverables, well and paying time & materials only. Fucking unbelievable. If I had been involved in this project, I would have gone on record in the beginning as against this setup and I would have considered it doomed to fail.

It's interesting that they put together an RFP for a Systems Integrator and during the open question process "Carolyn Lawson said that she called potential system integrators and was told that they were not interested in bidding due to the lack of clear requirements and the limited budget (the state requested $96M, but was only funded $48)" So no potential bidders would bid on this fiasco.

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