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When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses
Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
Behind all of these things is that while computing power might double every 18 months or so, human efficency does not.
That is (one reason) why we are not living in paradise despite the huge increase in computational power we have seen in the last 20 years.
The city defends its decision to abandon its support contract: He said any expert who suggests the city spend the extra money should realize that "they don't have to pay for it."
Of course, they neglect to mention that any sane proposal to abandon their AS/400 and its service contract would have included being up and running on their "new and improved" PC system BEFORE dropping the support for the old system.
As noted in the article: Since then, because the city doesn't have a maintenance agreement with IBM to repair the computer and retrieve the data, five city hall employees have spent their days typing more than 25,000 names, addresses and tax information onto two personal computers.
Do they think these employees have nothing better to do? What about all the other hassles and pain caused by retraining, PC downtime, and all the other costs associated with their choice.
The government at that city obviously has NOT taken any classes on economics. They sound like my old boss... any hidden cost is not really a cost at all.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Really
There are about 25,000 names, addresses and tax data that have to be keyed into the PCs. The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day. At that rate, they'll be typing for the next six months. [...] Well, Renshaw said, training should take no more than a few hours. "You can learn the entire system in two or three days at most."
A case of penny wise and pound foolish.
moral idiots
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think the way it generally works for IT staff is that they are expected to perform miracles with ageing computer equipment and lack of training.. at least thats what ususally happens. Then they take the flack when it all goes a bit wrong.
:)
Apply the 'mushroom' theory.. kept in the dark and fed on sh*t
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I believe Chris was referring to the people with the decision-making power, not to the general population of Wilkes-Barre. The IT people made some poor decisions and they deserve to be called bozos. The people of Wilkes-Barre should also be upset with them.
Carbonite
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
I was always under the impression that an AS400 was the computing equivilent of a tank; it took a crew of people to maintain and run, but could sustain lots more abuse than, say, a car (PC).
So what's "crashed"? Does it not turn on? Does it just need a replacement card of some sort (I thought everything was hot-swap on these things)? Are the drives bad and there's no backups? Did the magic smoke come out of it? What?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
"tax office employees have been entering the tax information in two personal computers."
...
Ok. They said 6 months to re-enter the data. Two people, two computers. Let's say they earn $10/hr.
6months *4 weeks/month * 40 hours/week * $10/hour * 2 employees
= $19,200
That's almost enough for two years of their service contract.
PCs:
$1000 each * 2 + misc expenses puts it over the top I think.
The fact that these employees will be maintaining these PCs ad infinitum doesn't even need to be considered to show the stupidity. Not to mention the BSA audits, the MS support calls, the endless software licence upgrades,
I think what we have here is the ever popular job security plot. We junk the good hardware and buy the bad hardware because we can maintain the bad hardware ourselves and thus we create ourself a job. With the good hardware, all we have to do all day is drink coffee and gossip. We're the first guys on the chopping block when costs have to be cut.
I've seen this time and time again. Junk the $20,000 Unix server that runs the entire company and gets rebooted once a year, replacing it with a network of NT boxes which require 3 full time employees to maintain and crash weekly.
Why don't people get fired for this?
Replace PA with any other state, country, or town; and the previous would still hold true.
Fuckwitism exists outside of your shitty state, you know. I live in Switzerland, and you snotty USA people still think this place is utopia!
Or if they've been really cheap they've had a lapsed contract for a while....
First a power supply died and nobody cared... then a disk crashed and nobody cared... then a memory chip failed and nobody cared. Then thet finally lost redundency and finally somebody cared.
--Rob
This appears to be a typical case of accountants gone mad, saving money on paper, but ending up costing a lot more in a disaster situation. The fact that they have a reel to reel tape for backup, ( I recall a /. article announcing the end of manufacturing reel to reel tapes just a short time ago), means that you have a situation where accountants have gone mad.
They would also typically have grossly underpaid computer staff who have hit rockbotton in morale as well. IBM would have tried many times to tell them they aren't really saving any money by acting the way they have, but IBM can't actually make them act reasonably. Maybe the accountant is a secret agent for Bin Laden.
I have seen this kind of behaviour many times before. Like when I worked for a major insurance company that had a dinosaur IBM mainframe still chugging away in the corner for the end of month run, when they had much more powerful IBM mainframes running everything else, just because the old machine ran DOS and they hadn't converted the programs to run on MVS yet. There was only one guy left who even knew how to repair it, and no parts.
Or a major, multinational manufacturer, when we upgraded an old machine, some bright spark from the customer had the bright idea of using the old 1GB disks in the new machine and saving one 9GB disk cost. The amount of time it took to work around this imposition, in terms of backing up the old system to the new, meetings, hassles, the disks dying anyway over time, etc, cost more than the $5000 saved.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
It is the people holding the purse strings who should get the boot in this case.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
I dont know how you got modded insightful... but here goes my beef with your comment...
... and B. take away from the pocket stuffing money-pool. (I have yet to meet a non-corrupt city-manager) ... and if it isnt the city manager ...someone else is blocking progress.
A. The town has no excuse. Hiring a IT + a IS person only 5 years ago for a paltry $50,000 a year each + replacing the AS/400 and it's software with a least cost approach is very doable, and aould have been the minimal approach. 100K a year + 50K a year for department expenses (Yes, you CAN do this with less than $50K a year in department expsenses INCLUDING equipment purchases for a town with a population 60K)
Problem #1 - I'm betting the City/town manager is stuffing his pockets heavily and will NOT hire someone smart enough to A. notice this fact
Federal grants have been available for over 15 years to help city's and towns replace aging computers and actually get technology and tech positions..
Money is not the problem... no matter what they say. The problem is incompetence and FUD. they liked how the 30 year old computer+program worked.. Sally, dan's sister and married to the chief, in the accouning department doesnt like change... we have to keep her happy... and Steve, the brother of dan, knows how to work the AS/400 and is allowed to do that every other thursday unless the hallways need waxing...
THAT is the problem... and all small towns have that problem... morons got voted in, and they keep getting voted in (By the same morons, and relatives).. I spent a year living in my cabin on horsehead lake in Mecosta, MI. A town that if you sneeze when driving through you will miss it.. what is the general population made of? Sociopaths.. people that dont like people and like tons of crap in their front yards, houses that look crappy and they are HAPPY that the town doesn't enforce lawn mowing, not living in a house that should be condemned and 3 cars in the front yard that should be crushed for the steel.
Dont ever expect something smart to happen in small town government (mid-sized either) as the smartest in town is there only on vacation or is trying to get the hell out.. NOT there to be the mayor.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's the wrong question. It's not the hardware that is important, it's the DATA. Which shows how foolish/ignorant Hayward's decision was.
Think about it, if your computer system is destroyed you can get a new one for the same price (think insurance) and it probably runs faster and does more.
But if you lose your personal data (emails, source code, certs, keys), it's going to be hard or impossible to get it all back. Insurance payouts would just be a poor consolation here.
In this case it's probably just access to the data. They should just pay IBM and get back access to the data (or most of it), rather than pay people to type in 25,000 records AND WAIT months for it to be done. Worse if more records are coming in daily and there's a deadline...
Either Hayward is stupid, or there's some other battle behind the scenes.
Yeah, AS/400s are pretty crazy. We have a few here at work, a couple of 32-processor jobs with about 1.5TB of storage between the two. The way the PC clients interact with the system is quite fascinating.
They are super slow but rather robust. And as you said, IBM support is top notch. All the hardware is monitored internally, and then the machine can pop up a warning message for the operator who's running it. Then the machine dials out and sends a service request to IBM. I was sitting here when a drive crashed (1 of 108) and I heard the modem dial out, then I swear 4 minutes later IBM called to schedule service.
Of course, this sort of equipment and service costs money. But the system I'm sitting next to right now counts about 900 MILLION dollars a year in revenue so it's worth it--it absolutely MUST be running 24/365. Forget 99.999 or whatever microsoft is touting.
I saw a little 4 proc e-series one on ebay for a half-mil; that doesn't include the service contract..
You see a lot of them in State and Federal government, and as a poster mentioned, casinos and hotels.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If the two copies don't match, the system beeps, or turns the record red, or something. Then someone (either the second operator himself, on the spot, or somebody after the fact) can determine which (if either) is the correct copy.
This should be a lot faster in terms of man-hours than entering a whole third copy of the data.
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