Can you say PR?

In a recent Bacon's Rebellion [complete text] article, I read Doug Koelemay's praise of VITA, and decided one of two things must be true: Either Mr. Koelemay didn't have time to do his research and just downloaded the CIO's published reports, or VITA paid him to do a little damage control for them. Because frankly, it was a load of giraffe poo.

Some specifics, if you will:

"VITA immediately consolidated three different organizations, 600 personal computers, 100 servers and 383 employees."

The only way this consolidation could be considered "immediate" is if you use the timeframe of the cosmic eternity. In the lifespan of galaxies, yeah, it was immediate. Anywhere else, it dragged on painfully. It took months for the initial consolidation, and from then on, every single agency that was to come on board was behind schedule.

"The transformation of the delivery of Virginia government services, in fact, will roll out steadily over the next seven to 10 years. In election time, that means three more governors will have the chance to help these transformations work over four or five biennial budget cycles of the General Assembly. "

Steadily would be nice, but so far the only things that have steadily rolled out have been delays. And the odds of upcoming Governors liking an idea set in motion by a previous Governor are so slim as to be anorexic.

"So, VITA now provides 100 interactive government services online. It estimates that about 35 percent of the more than 32 million accesses last year via the virginia.gov portal occurred outside normal business hours. That’s 24/7 government service. Efficiencies allowed the agency to provide about $1.5 million in free services to the State Board of Elections and about $1.3 million annually in free Web design, hosting and other services for agencies lacking IT resources."

VITA provides these? Almost all of them existed before VITA was created, according to an inside source. The Virginia.gov portal worked quite well when left alone by VITA's clone, DIT (Department of Information Technology, run, strangely enough, by the same people who run VITA), and the State Board of Election services were all provided by a private company (NIC and its branch, VIPNet), who had been providing these services for free for several years before VITA surfaced. This reminds me of the old joke about the guy running around waving his arms. When someone asked him what he was doing, he said he was keeping the dinosaurs away. When the person replied that there aren't any dinosaurs, he said, "See, its working!"

"No disruption of services has occurred in two years, even to those offices and agencies involved in moves as a result of the Capitol renovation project. "

Really? I guess he wasn't signed up for the VITA Alerts. VITA's hardware and software went down more often than a $5 hooker at low tide.

Insider's at VITA have commented that, as of this writing, they still don't have the resources or infrastructure to handle their existing business requirements, much less the added load they need to continually take on to be a success. They desperately try to find revenue to replace the funds the General Assembly screwed them out of, including such "cost-saving" solutions as charging $700 a month for the hosting of a simple static Web site. Most agencies that fall under VITA have no choice but to pay these outrageous prices, but "out-of-scope" agencies just laugh and walk away (as a reference, you can get the same level of hosting for under $20 a month).

But how can anyone expect VITA to be a success? The management and 99% of the staff have no idea what they're doing or how they should be doing it. Projects run late and over budget, often never finishing. Almost any given project will require three groups to meet three different times, just to find out what the previous group met about. They have no real vision or understanding of the Internet or even the change of technology (one VITA Executive still refers to Dominion Power as VEPCO, which was about 2 name changes and 20 years ago). They are impressed by new technology like "newsletters" and "links" but can't seem to figure out why data harvesting and spamming are bad, and accessibility and efficiency are good. Shit, these are the folks who don't realize that having a 6 year Web project is like setting fire to your money. By the time they finish a 6 year project, everything will be woefully out of date and inadequate.

And don't get me started on VITA's reasons for turning the entire state into a .Net shop, and Vb .Net to boot ("our two guys only know Vb .Net")

Who knows what Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Man? theShadow Knows.