Monday, November 28, 2005

Bacon's Rebellion: Where's the Beef? VITA Mystery Solved.

An interesting article in Bacon's Rebellion about VITA and Secretary Huang. Feel free to comment here or in Bacon's Rebellion.
[article]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Er... Eugene? You there?

Can you at least confirm or deny your contempt for state employees, even those you've never met, at agencies who were doing a good job managing IT before VITA and will continue doing so until everything falls apart?

Would you confirm or deny whether you even consider it possible that some agencies were in fact doing a good job before VITA? That some of the good work that got Virginia such great overall IT management ratings in recent years was done before VTIA was even a gleam in George Newstrom's plastic hair?

And if you are willing to admit that, can you admit that it's possible that some people in state IT were already competent, had good ideas, were moving things forward and solving the very problems VITA has been helpless to actually address (though you are some success-reporting so-and-sos, I'll grant you)?

Or do we have to sit here and think that you have really read the entries on this blog and are completely disinterested in them except as spin fodder?

Anonymous said...

Yah. He's full of it. We've lost money, esp. on upgrading software. Can't even use a charge card - and VITA's totally nonresponsive and unaccommodating. Costs more, takes longer, more forms. Great work. I wonder why they're so... disliked.
The waiter's dull and slow, and the food's even worse.

VITA
Expect the Beast

Anonymous said...

Did he go back to California already or something???

Anonymous said...

Part of the problem is that most of us know the VITA 'cost-savings' numbers are manufactured from fairy toots, but the people who can prove it--people in the agencies who deal with the paper trails--are afraid to go public for fear of retaliation. Reporters don't seem interested in talking to IT managers in the agencies, and neither does Jim Bacon for that matter. Nobody wants the real story and the people who can expose the money lie are in a bad position. If you spit out the actual facts and figures ("VITA claims to have saved our agency x amount, but here is the stack of proof that they're actually costing us considerably more") it's easy to suss out which agency the dollar totals are coming from.

On a separate note, I am furious with Mark Warner for painting himself a 'technology governor' but doing absolutely nothing to ensure that electronic voting in Virginia is safe, verified, and not just handing the keys over to Diebold. It's a serious issue and he has completely dropped the ball on it. Perhaps a big corporate donor dropped a hanky in his path when he was on his way to the SBE to stand up for his constituency.