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Wisconsin's Apologist for IT Failure: In recent times, Wisconsin has experienced major IT meltdowns, prompting the State Auditor to release a report recommending various IT reforms. Wisconsin's state legislature also appointed a special task force to review failing IT projects, suggesting the state genuinely takes IT failures seriously. I find these steps to be...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-08-01
Careless in Nevada: According to News.com, staff working for Nevada's governor mistakenly posted his Outlook username and password on the Internet. Aside from the weak password (reflecting a previous Nevada governor's name), don't they have controls in place to prevent this kind of thing?[via Download Squad]; Tags: Government projects; Blog posts 2007-07-22
State of Failure in Wisconsin: Wisconsin seems to be the land of IT project failures. Last April, the state released a report describing broad project failures running through the state government. As a response to so many IT failures, the Wisconsin state legislature formed a special task force to examine the problems. Now, the Wisconsin...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-07-22
Ignoring a Problem Doesn't Make it Go Away: An audit of the Massachusetts state crime lab revealed that evidence in 16,000 criminal cases was never analyzed.Denial and information hiding are frequent components of the project failure lifecycle, whether in the crime lab or in the IT world. Eventually, the hidden problems see the light of day, usually after...; Tags: Project strategy, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-07-16
"Every Problem Imaginable": Twenty years ago, the Tennessee state government built a 70,000 square-foot data center in a location that now appears to have a few problems. What kind of problems, you ask? Well, heres what Computerworld has to say on the matter:The state located its data center on top of unstable, jiggly...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-07-12

Wisconsin Fights Failure: The Wisconsin state legislature has created a special group to study IT project cost overruns, called The Speaker's Task Force on Failed Information Technology Projects. So far, they have scheduled monthly meetings running through August. If these meetings stop in August, then little will be accomplished. On the other...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-07-11
Lunch with Arn Howitt (When Failure is NOT an Option): I had lunch yesterday with Arn Howitt and Lydia Segal. Arn teaches at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government, and is Executive Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. He and Dutch Leonard run the Program on Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Management at the Kennedy School. These...; Tags: Project strategy, Interview, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-06-08
Failed Aspirations at Project Aspire: According to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, Floridas Project Aspire has been stopped in mid-track. From the article:A top Florida official has suspended work on Project Aspire, a proposed financial management system for state government. Alex Sink, the states chief financial officer, said in a release that the project was...; Tags: Project failures, Implementation, Government projects; Blog posts 2007-05-21
Eight Causes of IT Project Failure: Recently, I blogged about an excellent report, released by the UK National Audit Office, on the subject of IT project failures. That report examined 24 IT projects, to draw conclusions about the causes of both project success and failure. While the reports primary focus is on project success factors, it...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-12-07
Government Report: UK IT Projects Still Failing: Back in the 2001 time frame, the Office of Government Commerce National Audit Office in the UK established a program for avoiding large-scale IT failures. The program, called the Gateway Process, established a series of evaluation milestones, or gates, against which a project must be reviewed over its lifecycle. The...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-12-04
Project Ocean Lives!: Back in August, I blogged about Project Ocean, a major implementation meltdown on a City of Philadelphia project. The project was suspended amid allegations of incompetence, politics, and corruption. According to ComputerWorld, the project is now restarting: Philadelphia officials announced [September...; Tags: Project success, Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-10-11
Voting Touchscreens are Evil: Diebold has been in the news lately for producing electronic voting machines that lots of people dont trust. Techdirt points out that one set of issues seems related to the touchscreens themselves. Therefore, Diebold recommends installing a mouse and warns users not to touch the touchscreen. You can guess the...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-10-07
Failure of the State: ComputerWorld reports that Louis Gutierrez, CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has submitted his resignation. From the magazine: In a letter yesterday to his staff, Gutierrez said that when he joined the states Information Technology Division ITD he looked forward to many challenges. But one thing he said he...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-10-04
School Loan Information: Sharon Gaudin reports in InformationWeek on a little problem at the US Department of Education: seems they forgot to test a software upgrade before deploying it on their website. Well, I suppose its no big deal&well, except to the 21,000 people whose personal information was exposed on the web for...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-10-03
"Reckless": A report by the Work Foundation in the UK is sharply critical of public sector ICT information and communication technology projects, saying that too much recklessness blights government IT projects.The press release includes the following tidbits:Contrary to the stereotype, public sector managers have sometimes been too gung-ho in their attitude...; Tags: Project failures, IT issues, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-09-29
Election Troubles: The Anchorage Daily News reports about technical problems with new Diebold voting machines. From the article:Problems with Alaska’s new touchscreen voting machines slowed election returns Tuesday and caused elections officials to hand count and manually upload vote totals from several precincts across the state. Election coordinator Lauri Wilson said several...; Tags: Implementation, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-08-28
Taxing Problems: The Wall Street Journal reports subscription required that $2-300 million of fraudulent US tax refunds were paid due to an IT project screw-up. From the article:The management efforts of both the IRS and its contractor to improve our automated-refund fraud-detection system were insufficient and are unacceptable, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-08-24
Gasp! Military Cost Over-Runs: Government Computer News reports that cost over-runs on software projects are a problem at the Department of Defense. Anyway, from the article:The problem is huge. In fiscal 2006, the Defense Department will spend as much as $12 billion on reworking software—30 percent of its estimated budget of $40 billion...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-08-24
Free Medicare Money! Oops, not so fast.: Senior Journal reports that the Medicare program erroneously sent out $50 million in drug refunds to seniors, due to an unspecified computer glitch. Unfortunately, the seniors who received over-payments must return the money.A call left by this intrepid blogger seeking more information from the press officer for the Centers for...; Tags: Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-08-24
Australian Cargo: David Jacobsons blog describes a report prepared by Booz Allen Hamilton, analyzing problems in the Australian Integrated Cargo System. The system is intended to track goods coming into Australia by either air or sea. A variety of implementation problems with system resulted in traffic congestion and escalating costs, and the...; Tags: Project management, Project failures, Government projects; Blog posts 2006-07-17