Thursday, September 29, 2005

Voting Systems Hitting the Rocks

About 10 years ago, a business acquaintance was asked to join a group of high-powered IT-types in reviewing the State of Wisconsin's IT infrastructure with an eye toward rationalizing both the database-compatibility and the ferocious machine-costs of the State's systems.

The group failed. Oh, they produced a report, all right. But Thompson and Klauser did not have the muscle to force the various State agencies to give up their individual IT fiefdoms.

Thus, Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) has a problem:

During Wednesday's board meeting and in a letter sent to the board Tuesday, Accenture senior executive Meg McLaughlin said her firm was partly responsible for the delay because of software problems, but she insisted the state was also at fault because of problems linking state computer systems to the voter database.

The voter database needs to access driver's license information kept by the Department of Transportation, death records maintained by the Department of Health and Family Services and the Department of Corrections' file of felons.

We all know that Accenture is happy to illuminate the State's IT problems.

On the other hand, Accenture took the contract WITH the deadline (which they will miss.) Didn't they look at the system-compatibility issue BEFORE making all those promises?

(Duhhh!! alert)

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