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Michigan Sues HP Over Decade Long, $49 Million Incomplete Project
itwbennett writes: On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s. Through the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney's fees and the funds needed to rebid and re-procure the contract.
I love it when sales folks write checks that their ass's can't cash.
I'm sure that there are political entities that are gonna have fun with this one. Guess who the leader of HP was when this deal was brokered?
CEO: Carly Fiorina (July 19, 1999–February 9, 2005; Chairwoman September 22, 2000–February 9, 2005)
Was that your first guess? Oh Noes here comes the train of idi.. *damn, too late*
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Just another in the long line of abject failures that define Carly Fiorina's career.
I'm writing in "Fucking NOBODY" for President. I suggest you all do the same. Shut it the fuck down.
Posting AC because I'm not fired yet. The Navy just moved up the recompete on NGEN, and the deal was one base year, 4 option years... what a joke. Meg knows this contract is losing money and wants to lose it to let go of all the US Citizens and their expensive security clearances. I'd be surprised if they even bother making a realistic bid for the USAF contract.
At 50 million bucks, why didn't they emulate the old machinery or port the code to an interpreter running on a modern system? Off the top of my head, that sounds like the most reliable ways to duplicate exactly an old system.
That explains it. I'm guessing their "solution" was to throw Ctrix at the problem and call it a day.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just another $20 billion and it'll be done, we swear!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The statute of limitations for civil claims is 4 years. Citizens (corporations are people too) have rights superior to the government, not the other way around.
JJ
Actually HP wasn't involved this deal until three years after Carly left. EDS made the contract with the state in 2005. The same year, Carly left HP. Three years LATER, HP bought EDS in 2008.
Wow, the LAST thing I want to do is take HP's side in ANY argument. But (reluctantly...) in all fairness, getting off the mainframe is very VERY difficult, for a large number of reasons, not the least of which IBM's commitment to preventing that from happening.
In the decades I've been in IT, I've seen three fairly large companies make a concerted effort to get off the mainframe. All failed. One ended up upgrading the mainframe. One ended up renting mainframe time from ISSC. One is still trying, years later.
I don't know what happened in this particular case; maybe HP saw this as a cash cow they could milk for several years, due to the fact that the industry expectation of success is so low. But there is a possibility that HP saw this as a genuine business opportunity, and didn't realize until later that it just wasn't possible.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Actually , no. HP wasn't involved this deal until three years after Carly left. In 2005, EDS made the contract with the state. The same year, Carly left HP. Three years after that HP bought EDS in 2008.
So trying to put this on Carly is a lot like blaming George Bush for Obamacare.
Large IT companies seem to make most of it's money by taking on customers that nobody in their right mind would take on, basically due to the fines and punishments that come with abject stuff-ups for mission critical system from three-letter agencies and large companies.
Yet somehow they make a profit and completely hash it up while protecting themselves legally - ready to find another victim.
Sales people walk in and sell to these customers the moon and kitchen-sink - including things which are technically not possible thanks to liberal use of marketing-speak - taking up many words in the English language to say very very little, but sound impressive. Words like "cloud" and "new IT" and "big data" etc. etc.
These ridiculous expectations are then dumped on the tech staff who are only told AFTER the fact. Tech comes back and mentions that what has been sold is impossible to implement within reasonable budget/timeframes.
In any case to protect the IT company legally, the people who work for them have to write up loads and loads of documentation and other ITIL legal stuff to ensure that any time that they touch the system to make any change whatsoever that the company is covered legally from any multi-milliondollar fines. Not only does this take a lot of time to write up, but it's very expensive to pay people to do this, so costs to the customer mount exponentially depending on difficulty.
While all these bureaucratic nonsense goes on, nobody can actually do very much on the environment.
People come and go from the company over the large amount of time it takes to get stuff done, typically not handing over work properly and costing the IT company more time to retrain new employees, and some of them are simply thrown in the deep end with little help. Due to the insanity these new employees have to work with, they typically quit early and change jobs - costing even more money and wasting more time. To deal with this issue and to try and save money, the jobs are then farmed out to India or the Phillippines, and to places where people will accept lower pay and probably make an effort to put up with the nonsense due to their life depending on it.
So now you have a bunch of people on the account whose English is not 100% and who are trying to deal with a complete mess, completely remotely. Because it's all outsourced and done remotely with various people scattered all over the world in different timezones - you can imagine how difficult it is to get everyone together to decide on anything. A good amount of time is wasted on communication and collaboration - which costs the customer even more money again.
You can be fairly certain that given that there are too many cooks, they stuff up and this wastes more time, costs a little less money now, but now what is produced is still not very much and the quality is iffy.
Given the iffy quality, this now causes more problems and takes more time and costs more money to fix - which the customer ends up paying for.
End result? The whole project goes WAY over budget and takes WAY too long.... BUT, thanks to the IT company filing all the paperwork THAT WASTED ALL THIS TIME IN THE FIRST PLACE, they feel that they are legally protected from the client - who feels that they have been completely screwed (which they have).
So the customer eventually sues for this hash of a system that is unfinished and over budget.
Large IT company comes back with all the documentation and contract legalese and says "Sorry about your luck"
Large IT company goes on to find fresh meat, and the cycle repeats.
Customer goes to another oversized IT vendor and they do the same thing.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This may be a talking point during GOP debates. When GOP will start talking about fixing healthcare, they can be countered with Fiorina's success in Michigan HP project.
It happened during Fiorina's watch.
It can also be used as a talking point, that private entities operate better. Except private entities always underperform when they operate together with the state entities.
P.S. Obamacare sucks.
Saber -> EDS -> HP
HP pays SC $44 million penalty to SC.
SC pays DC $100 million penalty.
Taxpayers rejoice.
http://www.wltx.com/story/news...
http://www.channelnomics.com/c...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s.
$49 million is pretty expensive for a low end PC.
as others have said, from the technical end (speaking from experience), there are plenty of ways to skin a cat like this, from emulation through porting, depending on the situation, and generally none of these are difficult to actually DO.
the only problem is you have to hire an actual programmer - someone who really can read and translate the code.
you cannot fix this with money, the solution does not come in a box, like executives do.
in short, if it was written by a coder, you need to hire a coder to fix it.
that simple.
good luck finding a real one, though.
and ps, this is not a bug, it is a feature - we value employment.
all three of us.
When the sales men's checks cashes, I read stories on dot slashes, about states who then sue For larges sums and stashes; The moral of the day is you see, you must say when it takes a long time for bytes to become hashes
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You sound like a massive faggot.
It meant some salesman wrote a check so big, that when the bank went to withdraw - his ass was not big enough to handle the withdrawal. It prolapsed, leaving a dreaded pink sock.
Socks to be him...
Thanks, folks, I'll be here in Vegas all week! Remember to try the veal!
If the Federal government would start doing this we could save hundreds or millions or possibly billions in tax payer money.
Don't care about facts. My wording was very intentional, too bad people only read what they want to see...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
True, but HP should have known this based on experience with other mainframe projects or via research on similar projects by other companies.
(1) The contract was made by EDS. HP had nothing to do with it, other than having acquired EDS.
(2) The migration is not just off the mainframe (a VMS system), it's onto a web-based platform instead, so they can get rid of both the mainframe, and the extra VT320 emulator they have to run to talk to the thing.
(3) Getting the same functionality and security of of a non-VMS system is a rather difficult endeavor, even if you use FLASK Linux or a similar purportedly secure computing platform, and add a bunch of them together and try to pretend "it's the same as a mainframe". Of all systems one can get off easily, VMS is not one of them, since it's so much better designed than most modern systems.
Scope of the task is *LARGE*
It's a doable proposition, but it would likely take (expensive to hire) 40+ year olds with experience in both sets of technology, along with people capable of parsing "business rules" out of languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, BLISS, and VAX (or DEC Alpha) assembly language, and whatever the heck else it was coded in at the time it was first deployed (depends on what they meant by "aging mainframe" in 2005).
These people would also have to be either very sophisticated in working over a "Chinese Wall" arrangement with another group doing the new systems development (not a development model most younger coders are familiar with, since you mention "interface contracts" and "unit testing" and "branch path analysis" to most of them, and they blink at you as if you've just taken a polyjuice potion and turned into Mad Eye Moody). Alternately, these old farts would need to have *also* kept current on new technology to allow them to be able to do both sides of the task.
So, you are talking expensive people in their mid 40's to mid 50's to get the job done.
Guess who were the first people let go or offered early retirement packages, to improve the profit-per-employee ratio for EDS to get the highest valuation in the acquisition by HP? Guess who were let go or offered early retirement as "cost reduction" measures in the four or five rounds of that HP has gone through since then?
It's a doable job, but I don't know of a company in the EDS (HPE now) or IBM Global Services space right now that wouldn't just start over an "fix business rules problems as they come up", rather than providing an equivalent (but now web based) system. I don't know experienced people in either of those two, since they've jettisoned all their expensive (talented) old people and replaced them with cheap (untalented) recent grads or offshoring.
If you think that's an unfair comparison on talent ... if you were a talented college grad, would *you* go to work at a company which is in the throes of a 30,000+ person layoff (something IBM did earlier this year, BTW: HP is a "late bloomer"), and in the process of spinning out the division you'd be working in? Or would you take that offer from Uber/Facebook/Twitter/Google/[anyone but IBM or HP] instead?
They are likely going to have to hire someone and PM it themselves. States are notoriously bad at that (and at spending money on their own people, as opposed to being willing to spend a lot of money on a contractor company) -- look at how Oregon and Oracle are arguing about the [still] nonfunctional Oregon State Healthcare Exchange to see what comes of hiring your own [unqualified] PM and "doing it yourself".
My cousin, Mark, could do it. Sadly, he is disabled now.
I could do it; so could a dozen or so people I could name off the top of my head (Wes Peters, for one). Sadly, we are all sane now.
They are pretty screwed; they are going to have to do a "second system syndrome" version of things, or settle with HP/HPE and pa
Tear up 90% of the specification. Convert what is left of the specification to code, test plan. Test and you are done.
Be aggressive. Insist on deliverables all the way thru. Triage the implementation by doing the most important things first.
Contractors typically have a lot of experience CYA-ing for the kind of work they do, unlike the customers, who are not experts at IT contract writing. It's a lopsided arrangement where the swindler has the experience of a 100 swindles behind them.
Table-ized A.I.
Another source:
http://www.michigan.gov/som/0,...
An interesting quote:
"...Michigan joins the motor-vehicle agencies in five other states -- California, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico and Vermont -- who have also parted with HP after attempting similar computer modernization projects."
Table-ized A.I.
I worked for the now defunct Data General in London back in the 90s, and in the new business unit, we tried repeatedly to do the mainframe replacement dance.
Every IT director we met hated us, because we would guarantee uptime and performance, and enormous savings in head count, energy, maintenance etc.
This would mean that their little kingdoms would be inexorably shrunk - suddenly a 5 million pound IT shop becomes a 1 million pound IT shop, with less staff, and the IT manager would be left without his minions and sense of self importance.
Their company's profitability was secondary to their perceived career.
We had much better luck with the same pitch to the CFOs, on the other hand, when we promised them 50% running costs as minimum annual savings.
Had a couple of CTOs got the boot along the way, but they were definitely the exception.
That's a great question, and the answer is, IBM Z-series business unit has, bar none, the most aggressive, talented and ruthless customer retention team in the world. You're right, there's no sane reason why a mainframe application can't be emulated at least for a stopgap measure.
IBM dropped backwards compatibility and that's an eminently sane explanation for why there might not have been an emulator available for a really old mainframe application. Don't pretend like it can't have been technically impossible.
The mid-1990's G3's were the last mainframes that could run code dependent on System/370 mode. I'm aware of at least two applications that needed a fair bit of rewriting just to be able to run on the later G-series mainframes ... and the users were exceptionally lucky that they had spent several decades paying large sums of money to keep around a few developers who knew the application in enough depth to be capable of porting them. If they had been like most under-funded States, there would have been nobody left who understood the application's design and it really would have been cheaper to undertake a complete rewrite.
I thought the state would only have one Secretary of State Office. What is the need for 130 of them?
Did the project fail because of incompetence on HP's part...or did the customer (the government in this case) keep changing the scope and requirements so often that it was impossible to actually do what they wanted? I know nothing about the details of this particular case, but either condition (or both) would not surprise me as the cause for the failure.
I could do it with $10mill and and 3 years.
Spend 6 months taking screenshots and documenting workflows...
Take a year to re-code in Java or some other similarly crippled language
6 more months to do a 'pilot' deployment
6 more months to patchup what you learned during the pilot
Last 6 months... Migrate to new application and backup/destroy old hardware... you must burn the boats so the crews will fight for (and not against) the change.
Takes one to see one.
I could do it with $10mill and and 3 years.
Anyone who makes a comment like that has obviously never done anything like this. You can't do a pilot deployment until you have migrated all of the old data out of the old system into the new one, and have a way to keep both systems in synch during beta. That alone would blow your cost and schedule budget.
So you KNEW that what you implied was false, and made the implication anyway? Yep, sounds like a liberal.
If anything, someone reading GP should have assumed a statement against Donald Trump, who has been the most active in attacking people's personal records but not the only one. You, and a few other people, somehow jumped to a conclusion that was not implied anywhere in the statement. The only fact I provided was the timing of the CEO position which is absolutely true.
Try reading what people write instead of what you wished they would write. You will look much more intelligent. I fully realize that my writing generally requires a 9th grade education to comprehend, which is why I requested that you read it again.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.