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When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses

Posted by chrisd on from the 9-track-really-isn't-the-answer dept.

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.

7 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. $850 a month by CmdrTaco+(editor) · · Score: 3, Interesting
    the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network.

    From the article:
    IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month.

    How much is their PC network worth, anyway?

    1. Re:$850 a month by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How much do you think it's worth?

      They have five employees entering the data onto PC's. One of the news articles stated that it is going to take 6 months to rebuild the tax database. 2.5 man years times, say $40K per man year (salary + benefits + office space etc) comes out to about $100,000, or just about ten times the cost of that maintenance contract. And that's jsut for the tax data. There are, of course, other municipal records on that computer.

      No doubt the personal computers involved are ALSO ageing, probably 386's running MS-DOS 6.1.

      Those responsible should be sacked.

  2. Submission to Darwin Awards! by ZenJabba1 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There is something more to this than they are letting on. It doesn't make sense that they would complain about around $10,000 a year in maintance, whilst keeping an IT person on the payroll that would go ahead with this.

    It sounds to me like somebody went and said 'hey it hasn't crashed in 10 years, I want this $10,000 in my paycheck because you already pay me so bad'.

    Why does this make me feel that IBM is going to get the flack because they wont fix the computer, and tens of thousands of people will not get the refund checks etc and it wont be blamed on the idiot who decided NOT to renew it.

    American Government is getting nearly as bad as American Corporations!

    --
    `find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
    1. Re:Submission to Darwin Awards! by haystor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm curious why the IBM support didn't orginally setup automatic backups of some kind.

      --
      t
  3. Typical.... by jerkychew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm guessing the powers that be are all non-IT types. You know, the kind of people that don't fix anything till it breaks. I can't count the number of executives I used to work with who never backed stuff up because "I've never had a problem before." Of course, it's always the IT grunt's fault when their hard drive crashes and their data is irretrievable.

    "What do you mean, 'it's gone'? I NEED that data for this meeting!"

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Re:Anyone reading who works for IBM? by tysonkam · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I do, and I work for Disaster Recovery Services: www.ibm.com/services/continuity The stories I could tell. . . they'll make you wan to pay cash and live in the hills.