Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Investigation Grows
VValdo writes "Department heads resigning, millions of dollars wasted, documents shredded, the government investigating. No, it's not Enron-- as previously reported, the $95 million contract with Oracle is blowing into a full-fledged scandal in California, according to today's LA Times, The article begins, "California Highway Patrol officers moved in Thursday to halt shredding at the state's information technology department, and Gov. Gray Davis suspended the agency's chief amid a widening investigation of the state's multimillion-dollar computer contract with Oracle Corp.""
Seriously, though, it sounds like the state government there needs a complete overhaul and there don't seem to be any oversights/checks on what really is going on there....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Who cares about paper... Shouldn't they be burning their backup tapes?
Um, this is my sig.
should get together and form MiracleSoft.
and "miraculously" land national contracts without shredders and scandals getting involved.
They'd be able to just buy everyone.
The guilty will be identified, heads will roll, policies revised...
In the end, nothing will change except it'll be even more difficult for California Departments to buy software than it is now.
Software licensing is really complicated. The typical bureacrat is just not up to it. If State Governments paid what Industry pays for IT executives, especially in California, there might be some chance that this kind of thing could be brought under control.
As it is, they'll just add more people to read over the contracts that none of them understand.
Even if they require contracts over a certain dollar amount to be reviewed by outside experts, the bureacrats will just start letting contracts just under that limit to lower their exposure to review.
that if Oracle gets pulled in to this and is indighted in any way and forced out of business, that they sell the DB tech to Sun.
Oracle is to much of a force in the DB market to just let MS have it, and if MS did get their rechid claws on it, we can say goodbye to the server room.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
$25,000 for a $95,000,000 contract? What sort of a deal is that?
No business sense, so of course he should go.
(That's a joke for any defamation lawyers out there).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"California Highway Patrol officers moved in Thursday to halt shredding at the state's information technology department...
You can always count on Ponch and Jon to step in and save the day.
- Mike
Hopefully, with the close media scrutiny that a scandal like this provides, there will be some spillover press onto Oracle's lobbying for a national ID (run on Oracle of course). It would be nice if this raises the public's awareness and provokes their outrage. Articles like this make me especially curious about how much money Oracle has given to Sen. Diane Feinstein's campaigns.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I really gotta get one of these shredders. What's with the assumption that Oracle and MS are the only choices for database systems?!
Blar.
They kept the money in state instead of sending it to that state further north!!!
there are thousands of ENRONS waiting to happen...
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-050302oracle. story
Oracle is serving their own bad press!
The Davis campaign committee reported receiving the Oracle check in June, two weeks after Oracle won the lucrative state software contract, which was awarded without competitive bidding.
Without competitive bidding... And a check received from a company boasting its software is unbreakable.
No, this is not quite on a par with the W. Bush dealings with Enron. But it's getting close.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
flamebait my ass
go screw yourself, cock sucker moderator
They probably overbought licenses to avoid the posssiblity of a BSA audit.....ever. At least that's the excuse i'd use to cover my ass.
-ted
Well it seems that despite all of the rumors, predictions, and assertations that Microsoft would become the victim of criminal liabilities - that Oracle has appeared to reach this milestone first.
Larry Ellison, Founder and CEO of Oracle Corp was quoted as saying, "Oracle has raised the bar once again. We have heightened competition to a point where Microsoft can no longer compete." Summarily William Gates, Founder and CEO of Microsoft Corp was quoted as responding, "It looks like Ellison is going to get a headstart on the excon IT market. Looks like he finally beat me in something."
Yes the above was meant to be humorous. Yes its a joke. Yes I find it extremely amusing that for all of their proproganda on the subject, Oracle may be subject to stiffer criminal liabilities than MS ever has been as a result of this scandal.
Who knows how many state or federal officials they have attempted to bribe? This could really blow up in their faces.... well at least we still have IBM DB/2 to compete against the monster that is Microsoft.
Good Work Ellison...
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Would this be a story on here if it was, say, GE lightbulbs, instead of Oracle?
I am glad to see our tax dollars at work, helping to stimulate the jet fuel industry. That industry has really been hurting lately, and now Mr. Larry Ellison wanting to give back to the community, will be able to purchase even more fuel for his late night jet plane trips!
Not trying to troll, just confused.
Ok, maybe I missed something, but what are the highway patrol doing stopping people shredding stuff? Perhaps they were in a mobile shredder van driving down the interstate whilst throwing paper out of the back?
I would have thought this would have been a job for investigators (not sure of a designation - in the UK it would be CID) rather than beat cops. Are the californian police so under-funded they had to get members of a completely unrelated department to assist?
Maran
And this is a Good Thing. I've got nothing against relational databases where they have their uses; but in the past ten years every application has been converted to requiring a relational database. I personally know of several cases where the data - which used to be managed on an old PDP-11 or the original IBM PC in under a megabyte of disk space - has been migrated to Oracle, at enormous cost and expense. Things that used to be simple (e.g. a list of a few hundred customers) now require a team of Oracle database experts and extensive optimization just to keep up with the same performance that was achieved on twenty-year-old hardware without Oracle.
There's even an official designation for a misused and missaplied technology like this: Golden Hammer.
Looks like Larry's gonna get the "Criminal" bit set in his entry in the National Big Brother database.
So how much are 270,000 MySQL licenses?
Governor Reagan would never have let that happen. Hell, if the state was hurting for money, he'd probably just sell some guns and stuff to the Nicaraguans again.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
People and businesses are so apathetic these days that this nonsense will not spell one bad omen for Oracle.
Usually you'd think that Oracle would get a bad rap for nonsense like this. For one, offering a ridiculous price tag on its software. Second, they provided the "goods", so to speak. Oracle are as mired in this mess as the state gov't in California. So will they get any trouble for it? Of course not. They are, I presume, going to laugh all the way to the bank with the added bonus of not even being required to provide whatever goods and services were purchased. Unless this is being reversed, and assuming all the money has been paid. Usually the gov't can't just say "we made a stupid, give us our money back." Not as if they can make threats either... look how weak they are against Microsoft.
Basically I am trying to point out that Oracle had a hand in this. They are clearly shifty and underhanded. But nonetheless, businesses everywehre will still look to them and place their trust in Oracle to provide a database solution. They will not realize that these huge software companies are unusually corrupt as far as businesses go. They will not say, "let's switch our departments to MySQL instead."
Just the same as with Microsoft. No matter how many incidents creep up that show they are not to be trusted. No matter how many laws they break, everyone remains willing to shovel their money into MS in exchange for shitty software.
We've all asked this question, but I can't help it. HOW is it that these companies have become so powerful that they are legally allowed to do anything? Perhaps the movie "AntiTrust" was closer to the mark any of us might think. Will corporations next make mafia-esque killings? Will they have purchased so many judges and politicians that they can get anything pulled?
I can see admitting stuff you've done wrong in the past, but this is the epitomy of self-immolation!
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Hhmmm... seems well-informed and intelligent. Different from most posts that get modded down. What is this post doing here? Why is a journalist using slashdot to write about European politics? Can't get a voice elsewhere?
Does anyone remember a few months ago when Larry Ellison cashed all of his stock options? It was something like $700m. I wonder what his intensions were and why he did it?
http://www.askthevoid.com
So far:
Oracle has offered to cancel the contract.
Davis forced the guy bribed with a $25k check to resign.
Davis suspended the guy in charge of IT, the bribe recipient's boss.
Davis ordered a halt to all shredding and ordered the CHP to investigate.
It just looks like a coupla people in IT were massaging it on a big contract and got caught.
Politicians have been screwing over constituents for years. The Illinois License for Bribe scandal is boiling down now just in time for another scandal to emmerge to the front burner: our State's Attorney is soon going to have her Bar Association membership revoked.
Bottom line: this has been going on forever, however, it finally seems that people are wising up to it. Don't expect this to be the first or the last.
heyitsme
More details on the emerging Oracle scandal, including a chronology of events for those just hearing about the story, can be found in George Skelton's Capitol Journal column, which ran in today's LA Times under the title "No Defense Tactic Can Hide This Ugly Scandal."
Skelton's column is definitely worth the read--this is more than just a colossal sales job, and more than just a $25,000 campaign contribution to the governor oh-so-coincidentally two weeks after the deal. There are state legislators with family ties to this, and a startling lack of California employees (or departments) with any interest in using it.
Given the jitters many people have about the securities business today, the most ominous comment might well be a brief mention at the bottom of Skelton's column:
CA was famous for years for doing all sorts of stuff to "make the numbers" at the end of each quarter. You can only do it for so long--once everybody figures out that Sears is always running sales, nobody is willing to buy at anything other than the sale price. Writ large, the same thing happens to companies that are motivated by this quarter's presentation to the securities analysts: eventually customers learn to wait for the last week of the quarter, when you can name your price.
Oracle, in the go-go 90s, made money by the barrel--at one point a colleague observed that their margins were probably higher than the Medellin Cartel. If they have to resort to this kind of shenanigans to make the quarter's numbers, Oracle has bigger problems than a $25,000 payoff to the governor of California.
Than a second-rate governor sparring with a Bill Gates wannabee. Like terrorism, mideast wars, 47 of peole in L.A. lack health insurance, etc.
Whoa! The ads in the LA Times page are as obnoxious as I've seen. Did anybody else get the ads with Little Mermaid characters flying across the page? Ugly ugly.
Miko O'Sullivan
Nice Headline!
I've been doing a simple analysis about switching us from Oracle to PostgreSQL. I came to the conclusion that, except for some of our GIS apps and data, we could recoup the cost of our licenses within 2 years. The cost involved with PostgreSQL would be training and re-writing vertical apps. Not paying license fees to Oracle *should* cover that additional cost and pain of migrating and re-writing. The whole reason I'm thinking about this is because of the California scandal. Those guys should really be tied to a post and whipped (not by expensive hookers either). Anyway, I'm actually going to do a more formal analysis of this starting today. Has anybody out there had any experience doing a migratin of this sort, for a enterprise of about 3500 PCs?
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Looks like congress + business needs to ban shredders along with my TiVo and porn.
They only did it to save money. Perhaps they got the software at 50% off?
>Cortez had a lead role in pushing for the deal in which Oracle proposed to license software for asmany as 277,000 state employees and contended that it would save the state as much as $111 million, according to the state audit.
The more you buy the more you save. Had they bought it for every citizen of CA instead of just for state workers they would have saved WAY more money....
Wasn't it Hitler who said something like, "Lie to people long enough and they think it's the truth."
Kevin
Listen up people! This guy figured out that corruption is a daily occurance, and I thought that corruption only happened when the news reported it.
Apparently, There's nothing we can do, so we should stop ranting and just get used to it like an impotent 3rd world child worker who has no options.
So let's break it up. There's nothing to see here...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I don't claim to be an RDBMS guru, but I have worked with Oracle8i and I nearly freaked at the pricing (and it wasn't even going to be my or my employer's money!) - not just how much but their ridiculous "clock-speed-multiplier" scheme.
Even though I think it stinks, Oracle has every right to price stuff that way if that's what they want to do. However, I really have to ask, did anyone even evaluate whether or not a PostGreSQL solution would have met the fundamental requirement (I'm not talking about a kind of bogus trumped-up requirement that, in essence, says "product must behave just like Oracle[add appellation du jour here]")?
If I were making their decisions for them (and I probably should be!), I would make every effort to use an Open Source solution unless my requirement is just so specialized and so out-there that Oracle was the only thing that could do it.
Government is in the pocket of big business. Elected officials waste tax dollars and sodomize constituents. Video footage at eleven.
Not that I think we should just let this slide because it happens all the time, but...well...it does. We're more likely to sit up and take notice because it's in the tech industry, but everyone here is acting like this is the first time government officials have wasted tax dollars. It's been going on for centuries. Sitting here and typing away about how this *could* be fixed isn't really solving anything. I don't have any answers, and I don't want to sound like a parrot, but it's not just the tech industry that's fucked up - it's every industry. Everyone buys politicians. This will take sweeping reforms to fix, and those with the power to fix it are far too taken with getting rich off the system to care. You can vote for 'the other guy' but he's probably corrupt too. They've got us all by the balls now...
do not read this line twice.
While we're at it, I'd like a pony!!
********************
I object to Intellect without Discipline.
Stated this in a previous thread but worth stating again. Having worked for the bucket-head-known-as Eli Cortez who was appointed the State CIO and got them in this mess, the governor and California are getting what they deserve. This man has a history of screwing everything up on a grand and global scale like some sort of nuclear picnic. Just shows how powerful the unqualified and criminially negligient can be if you place them in key positions. Having destroyed a county and now a state, I'm sure Eli Cortez is being recruited to run the federal government as we speak. Call it "destiny."
+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm quite sure it's hard to pronounce."
- Govt. software requisitioner: "Hey, I don't need your product, at least I'm not sure if I do, but I'd like to buy $95 million worth of it anyway"
- Oracle exec: "Well, even though I have a fiduciary duty to my shareholders to maximize profits, and -- as a private citizen not elected to any office -- no duty to the taxpayers to ensure that the government is efficient in its spending practices, I feel uncomfortable taking your money. Please call IBM."
In the absence of proof of any wrongdoing on the part of Oracle (so far about the worst you can say is that they inflated the estimated cost savings -- which is nothing more than typical "lies, damn lies, and statistics" that all businesses use to convice you that you need their product-you-don't-need).And read the article, Oracle offered to terminate the deal, and is apparently standing by the offer; this is something that they're certainly not obligated to do legally (they may be obligated to do if from a PR standpoint, to deal with people like you who assume they've done something wrong before they're even done it).
Come on people, I'm as critical of big business as anyone (probably more so), but this is in fact just a case of Big Business as usual. It's like drunken sex with a stranger you don't like. It may make you feel icky, it may even be bad for you, but it's not illegal.
The real question:
How to the democrats blame this on Bush?
First off, I am just getting around to trying this myself so I'm only posting this as a try it yourself
Check out SapDB.org. Dell has a benchmark test posted. Note that this was v6.2 of SapDb and it is now v7.3.
The documentation is exhaustive. Oh GPL'd also. It has something called the Oracle 7 compatibility mode whatever that is, personally I don't care about that.
I have scoured google and can't find much about if from other users. I even have tried Ask Slashdot but they won't put up my post for some reason. I really wish they would.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
I'll settle for Larry Ellison.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
"Oh how sweet it would be."
How, exactly, would it be "sweet"? Many large companies depend on Oracle to provide a concise, up to data database product and support. Taking such a highly advanced product and making it GPL would only lead to chaos. There would be no single source for support and updates. Just as Linux suffers from an enormous multitude of incompatible versions, so would the Oracle database be bastardized and split up into different competing products by various companies and fringe groups.
Open source may be fine for system utilities and web browsers, but not for something as complex and crucial as Oracle.
...Bill Gates is laughing uproariously at Ellison because of this.
Who will they send next, Smokey the Bear?
Or better yet, they could create a new character -
Sharky the Auditor
"Only you can stop audit evasion techniques"
The Republicans are the party of Watergate and Iran/Contra.
Iran/Contra was not a crime. And once again, the Democrat brings up something from a quarter of a century ago.
Not to mention massive deficits from tax breaks for the rich.
You mean the tax breaks that eliminated taxes on the poor? You mean the tax breaks that eliminated tax shelters? You mean the tax breaks that doubled the revenues to the government during the 80s? You mean the massive deficits that were caused by the DEMOCRATS who were in power in congress at the time? Yes, congress creates the budgets.
After investigating Democrats for the last 8 years, the worst they came up with was a blow job!!
No one ever said Clinton wasn't smart. Of course, only Democrats believe that it's OK for the President of the United States to abuse his power to take advantage of interns.
Not to mention that he was found guilt of lying under oath. But hey, who cares if the guy whose in charge of enforcing the laws lies in court?
Daschle a liar? Can you come up with even ONE example of Daschle lying?
Oh, how about Daschle blaming the recession on Bush when it began before Bush was in office? He knows he's lying, but it sounds good. If you need more evidence, feel free to do a search on Google for "daschle lies". Lots of people document them.
And talk about rigging elections - this Republican president LOST THE ELECTION!
Uh, no, he didn't. He only loses the election if you shred the constitution and ignore the law. But hey -- Democracts have never minded ignoring the law, have they?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It would take a case as huge as this, involving a customer and money as huge as this, to take to court the question of whether or not software can be "returned."
I, for one, would love the ability to return (or even "transfer ownership of") software without taking the whole damn software industry to the Supreme Court.
RDBMS's are incredibly complicated pieces of software -- more complicated in many respects than an operating system. A true enterprise-class database has to be totally, completely, unquestionably consistant and reliable. While Postgress is an impressive product, it's still not in the same league as DB2, Sybase, or even MS-SQL.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It's not on the FUCKING ROOT.
Dumbass
Oracle also donated $25K on 6/20/01 and another $25K on 12/27/2000 to the campaign of Bill Lockyer, the current California Attorney General who's leading the investigation into this mess.
What this doesn't even take into account is that, while Oracle can be OK as a high-end database if you give it a dedicated DBA, it is absolutely awful as a quick-and-dirty databse. I doubt that there are 270000 Oracle licenses in the world that represent properly installed and maintained Oracle systems. Many users of databases would be served much better with something that's easier to intall and maintain than Oracle, even if that databse is less capable or less full-featured in some sense. In different words, if you take into account the high cost of installing and running an Oracle database properly, this contract is even more costly than it seems on paper.
You mean the tax breaks that doubled the revenues to the government during the 80s?
After Reagan's tax cuts, revenue FELL. Then there was the "Deficit Reduction Act" - the largest tax increase in history - and the huge increase in Social Security taxes on working people. Only THEN did revenue start to climb.
You accidentally left that out.
No one ever said Clinton wasn't smart.
I know, the lack of any evidence of wrongdoing is proof of a massive cover-up. The standard Clinton-hater line.
how does this get +2 informative :)
+2 funny perhaps but an informative would be (for a male moderator)
moderator detach your penis
insert penis ino ownn arse while eating cock
for female
well imm sure you can work it out
The problem isn't that there is too much database technology that people don't understand, it's that there is not enough people who understand database technology.
I see this time and time again: organizations that have Access databases that multiply like rabbits. People have tons of "reports" that not really reports but data carrying instruments from one special purpose system to another, where they are rekeyed in and manually processed etc. The whole process, and many staff positions required by it, are essentially overhead; they are required for coordination but produce no value in themselves. People are satisfied, because they don't perceive all this as an expense, but part of the job description. Then there is a challenge that requires organizational change. They have to produce a piece of information that they didn't before; perhaps it is a new government regulation, or perhaps it is a new business venture. Several outcomes are possible: complete failure to respond, response in a way that is superficially adequate but involves inaccuracies or problems of timeliness, and finall and/or the accretion of another level of organizational cruft.
Of course databases are not a panacea; they don't solve this problem. But they are a critical parts of the solution. The purpose of database technology is to enable the re-use of information. If you have an independent business process with only a small number of well defined interfaces, that is supported by mature software, I agree there is little reason to reimplement using database technology. But a priori this is a bad, or at least a dangerous assumption. Starting from scratch the best solution when long term record keeping is needed is a relational database.
And database technology is not that complicated from a application developer's perspective. It dramatically simplifies most software problems that involve anything more than the most basic record keeping. It takes care of data integrity and optimization and many security and administrative tasks. Speaking as somebody who remembers the days when you commonly created your own on disk data structures with pointers, indices and whatnot, I know that 99% of the time I'm better of not reinventing the on-disk data structure wheel. How many novice written binary search routines do you want to debug in your life? How many pointer rebuilding routines do you want to have to code? How many times do you want to tear into live production code because of deadlock problems that didn't come up in testing? How many times should customers have to send data sets to their vendors to have the file structures rebuilt due to crashes or bugs?
Finally, with respect to Oracle, it is not the safest product in the world to let an idiot loose administering, but it's not friggin' rocket science either, unless your project requirements dictate complex DBA setups. In these cases not only is a solution like Oracle far better than what you could come up on your own, it decouples solving these problems from application logic, reducing development risks. For simple cases, Oracle scales down nicely if you don't get overeager about tinkering under the hood. If you have the licenses already (big proviso), there is practically no reason not to use Oracle for any application, no matter how small.
Of course if you have to use a server that is admin'd by somebody else who doesn't care if your project shrivels up and blows away, well YMMV. But that is hardly Oracle's fault.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Iran/Contra was not a crime. And once again, the Democrat brings up something from a quarter of a century ago.
If it wasn't a crime, then why did President Bush have to pardon a slew of white house officials facing(or about to face) criminal charges just before he left office?
It was on Christmas Day, 1992 so you may have not noticed it. And unlike the heavily criticized Clinton pardons, these were done primarily to protect Bush himself from criminal charges. Pardon all the witnesses and they can't turn state's evidence on you, as Casper Weinberger, IIRC, was preparing to do.
BTW, the Iran Contra hearings were 15 years ago, not 25.
Can you imagine what would happen if it was Microsoft. The whole media will show nothing but this. That at least shows how biased people are against Microsoft?
> I'm still waiting for the:
> Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
> to be documented as being wrong. =)
there must be a whole slew of people who were fired for buying Microsoft... anyone want to speak out?
My version of calc.exe at work said "Error: Positive infinity".
MS must want people to think MySQL is REALLY expensive...
There is something amazingly and glaringly obvious about your post that is in the hearts of a lot of Americans that makes me sad and makes me sick. That there is some kind of crooked conspiracy here and that you have to tell everybody everything you do in order to be deemed a "good person". You have to ask the right people the right questions and you have to bend over and kiss the right ass in order to have any support.
Ronald Reagan was a hero. You may or may not have supported him or all of his ideas and actions, but this one thing will forever go down in history as a man who fought for his countryman against all odds. Those were American POW's in Iran. There was no apparent way of getting them back alive. Reagan begged Congress to help. The answer "No". Reagan begged other countries to help. The answer "No". He couldn't get support from Congress, from the Senate, from foreign leaders, so he did what 99.9999% of Americans would never do today...He became a true leader, a true man, he grew a spine, and he did what needed to be done to bring our boys home...fuck Congress, fuck the rules, fuck foreign leaders, fuck everyone and everything. The POW's needed our help and Reagan brought them home. So, to get that done he had to sell black market arms to the Contra's in Iran. Big fucking deal.
What they should have done was given the man a medal and called him a true American. But, instead, all of the whiny, spineless fucks in the US tried to bring charges down upon him and the administration for doing what a leader is born to do. To lead and to do what is right, even if everybody else tells you that you are wrong.
And THESE are the people Ellison expects us to trust with a national ID card program...?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
First, I don't recall that Bush was never shown to have any involvement whatsoever in Iran/Contra. There was the ridiculous rumor that he flew via SR-71 to Iran to negotiate the release of the hostages which set the stage for later administration involvement in Iran/Contra, but that was shown to be a fatuous lie with no substance whatsoever.
Second, Clinton pardoned a number of people who might have later turned against him, like Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell. Or rather, it was probably the case that they didn't turn against him earlier because of a promise of a pardon later. Either way, the clear appearance is that he pardoned these people to protect himself from prosecution.
Now maybe he can get a job for Oracle writing for their internal newsletter, or shredding papers, or sucking off Larry Elison.
File this under "It Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time".
-Don
California Builds a Useful Government Website
With a transaction engine and sophisticated Web technology, the state of California gets serious about the Web.
By Dylan Tweney, January 11, 2001
[...]
The site was developed under Arun Baheti, director of eGovernment for the state -- a position created by Governor Gray Davis last year. Incredibly, Baheti built the site in just 110 days, with a budget of $2 million, in time for this week's launch.
Rather than take a typical public-sector approach -- award the site construction contract to a single vendor, then let that vendor own the project from the ground up -- the governor instructed Baheti to pick a few best-of-breed technologies, then hire a consultant to help put the pieces together. That's standard practice in the private sector, but it counts as a significant innovation in the halls of the state capitol.
The result is a melange of technologies stitched together to create a strong site with an array of functionality. The site uses BroadVision for online transactions and personalization, Interwoven for content management, Verity for searching, and Broadbase for online marketing and visitor traffic analysis. Deloitte Consulting handled the integration and project management. The site is hosted on hardware at the state's high-capacity Teale Data Center.
To organize the site's information architecture, Baheti brought in a team of state librarians to come up with a meaningful information classification system and to develop the site's FAQ (frequently asked question) files. Baheti's team also took pains to ensure that the site is accessible to people with physical disabilities.
The result is a site that is remarkably effective at bringing together a host of government services and information. Carlo Grifone, a principal in the Sacramento, Calif., office of Deloitte Consulting, says that a guiding theme was the idea of "one government, one customer." In other words, visitors to the site don't particularly care which department or state agency is responsible for issuing fishing licenses -- they just want to go fishing. The site aims to help visitors find what they need without having to navigate a virtual version of the government bureaucracy.
The current site offers direct access to about a dozen state services, but many additional state departments and agencies are developing applications for the site. As these are ready, they will be plugged in to the current site infrastructure, eventually making my.ca.gov a true, single-stop California government portal.
While portals, personalization, and online transactions are old hat for commercial sites, this is the cutting edge for e-government. Let's hope other governments follow California's lead.
====
Uuuh, how about: let's hope other governments cover up their pay-offs and bribes better than California's.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Fascinating. But tell me this: what, exactly, does the North-South split offer as a preventive for corruption?
The problem here is that a major company gulled CA into buying more licenses than it has employees, remember? The impact of LA on nearby cities is irrelevant in this case, because what we have here is a case of simple, pure, quintessential dishonesty. It's a lack of ethics in government, not a case study for a political scientist in an ivory tower.
Yes, you can reorganize governments, add new levels of government, make things either simpler or more complex if you want--but realize that NONE of that changes what's in people's hearts. If people are greedy, dishonest, corrupt and conniving rascals, that's what they are, and no structural changes will prevent them from doing their dirty work. Geographic redrawing of political boundaries? Might as well try voodoo as a fix.
What is needed is a process of oversight and transparency that works to militate against corruption. That means honest people looking at what goes on, with full disclosure required. That can be put into place in any governmental structure, no matter how large.
Yes, finding honest people and keeping them honest is not easy. But it's easier if the entire system is totally transparent, with so many people aware of what is going on that keeping secrets is extremely difficult.
Like mosquito abatement and doing the laundry, keeping government honest is a task that never ends. It requires continual work. The is no use whining about that fact of life!
Davis and company need to be handed their walking papers, and new laws need to be enacted to open up the process that lies behind the awarding of contracts.
CA is not too big. It's too dishonest.
However, the fewer there are to be governed, the more apt government is going to be transparent. For instance, at the ultimate form of local government, imho, (the true New England town meeting) every dealing that the town has made is up for scrutiny of the citizens. There are instances of corruption, but it is generally detected quickly and recified before much damage can be done. Admittedly, this is an extreme example.