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.

Comments

hmm... could you do so much better ?

[selderrr]

before you start calling someone a bozo, please consider the complexity, the cost and the frustration of administrative computing. Most of the people who have to work with the system don't know at all what they are doing and usually consider it clumsy, slow, inefficient and way to expensive for what it does (or usually doesnt) do.

Honestly I *can* understand how they are fed up with an aging system that gives constant headaches and is a budget drain. Eventually it would have blown up by a flipped employee. I se ethose situations every day, and when those IBM suppport bozo's arrive, things usually start taking an even worse turn.

That said, they should offcourse have backed up their stuff, and after cancelling support, at least have worked out a phase out of the system, with a phase in of a new, better system. But again don't completely blame them for such a situation. I guess that a large portion of govt IT is in an equally fucked up state, but better covered up.

Re:Basic business, basic math

[WildBeast]

hmmm, you don't seem to get it. Usually government employees don't have much to do, yet they're paid anyways. So no, they won't be loosing much more money than what they're already loosing.

Oh, am I the first to tell you that the government wastes its money? How naïve you are :)

Re:$850 a month

[gordon_schumway]

Those responsible should be sacked.

And replaced with llamas.

Re:i wish they'd define 'crashed'

[nzkoz]

One of my employers clients uses an AS-400 to run their casino. The system has been running perfectly, without ever needing any restarts / repairs (bar software bugs in their applications) since 1984. Yep, 1984 .

AS-400s are some seriously amazing boxes.