Report Assails State Computer Oversight

Despite a much-publicized reorganization effort, the state has made little progress in resolving the management problems that caused it to waste millions of dollars on poorly designed computer systems, a legislative watchdog reported Tuesday.

Eighteen months after 11 multimillion-dollar computer projects were identified as being troubled, the legislative analyst’s office said the Wilson administration has still not come up with a plan for implementing its own task force’s recommendations to resolve the problems.

And Gov. Pete Wilson waited more than a year, the report said, to select a chief information officer to head a new, centralized office with authority to oversee the state’s vast computer network.

“Given the amount of time that has transpired since the state’s information technology problems were made known, there has been relatively little progress made across state government in resolving these issues,” the report concluded.

The 14-page report, the latest in a series of critical examinations by the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office of the state’s far-flung computer network, recommended that the Legislature continue to closely monitor expenditures on computer systems.

John Thomas Flynn, the state’s newly appointed technology czar who took office in November, said in an interview that he expected that many of the analyst’s criticisms would be resolved in the next few months. He said he has already begun to hire independent private sector experts to monitor 20 of the state’s most expensive and complicated computer projects, and expected them all to be in place by February.

Enumerating specific problems, the analyst’s office noted that since its last report the costs of establishing a statewide automated child support system may have increased as much as 71%, from $152 million to $260 million.

It also warned that the state now may have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to update a computer system at the Department of Motor Vehicles, an agency that “has no history of successfully executing a project of comparable scope or difficulty.” Two years ago, state officials decided that a $50-million computer project at the DMV was so riddled with problems that it had to be abandoned.

The report said the Wilson administration had taken several positive steps, including the creation of a task force to study computer problems, an executive order restricting the awarding of no-bid computer contracts, and the selection of Flynn as technology czar. Flynn held a similar position in Massachusetts, a state considered to have a model system for managing computer technology.

And it said reform legislation passed by the Legislature in the last two years had for the first time established a centralized authority to oversee the state’s highly complex and costly computer systems.

The report praised Flynn for moving quickly to press agencies to address a serious but quirky problem for computers--the advent of the year 2000.

Because many computer programs do not recognize any date beyond Dec. 31, 1999, millions of lines of computer code are having to be reviewed and sometimes recoded to recognize the years in the next millennium. The cost to the state of the reprogramming is estimated to be $50 million.

Despite the analyst’s criticisms, Assemblyman Jim Cunneen (R-Cupertino) and Assemblywoman Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) said the report recognized that the Legislature had built a foundation for state government to better grapple with modern computer technology.

“I think the Legislature used to kind of view technology as what you see at Fry’s, but I think [legislators] have finally learned that this isn’t a matter of buying a box, plugging it into a wall and expecting it to sort information,” said Cunneen, chairman of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on information technology.

Bowen said the report vindicated those legislators like her who had taken on the issue of information technology, which is a “very behind-the-scenes kind of project but very significant from a taxpayer and citizen point of view.”

She said she believed that they have now installed the safeguards that will prevent massive computer failures like the one at the DMV. She said she was not surprised that some of the computer problems that were identified 18 months ago were still around. “California’s a big state,” she said, “and it takes a fair amount of time to turn a ship like this around.”