Thursday, October 29, 2009

Keep ya ears open

Zombiewire is abuzz. Some schnizzelwizzel may go down on this All Hallow's Eve...or rather the Eve before All Hallow's Eve. Maybe not what you're expecting, but spooky nonetheless. I'm spookulating myself...

Meanwhile,

Nagin might have violated City Charter, Head and Midura charge

Does anyone even care anymore? If that headline read, "Nagin adheres to City Charter", it would have been front page news. Can you imagine?

Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Cary Grant apologized for the lack of notification but said the budget shortfall "came on us suddenly."

Suddenly? Yeah. How did we suddenly spend 10 million bucks?

Hey, I bet I know where $450,000 of it went....to yet another City IT contractor.

So I've got an idea on how to make back that 10 million and maybe more. The city should incorporate itself as the de facto standard for municipal IT service consulting. I think we've hired every firm in the country from Colorado to D.C. We should know everything there is to know about municipal IT services at this point, considering we've paid more for them than any city in history.

It's like we went into a brothel and said, "What the hell....let's do the smorgasbord!" Sadly, I think we're going to wake up broke, hungover, and wondering what the hell we were thinking. Maybe we can get Meffert to put it on Netmethod's credit card.

I'm not criticizing this new company, Telecommunications Development Corp. I don't know anything about them. But I do know we are apparently paying them for some pretty familiar services:

- Mainframe and System Migration
- System Architectural Design, Implementation and Maintenance
- Database Support
- Application Development
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
- Lagan Software Development and Implementation
- Training and Technical Support
- Capital Projects
- 311 Call Center
- Financial Infrastructure

All under the guise of "various Citywide Technology initiatives". Forgive me if I'm a little confused but haven't we already paid for the 311 service like two or three times? Wasn't that Ciber's gig?

And if I'm not mistaken, aren't we paying MSF for most of these services under another contract or am I confused on "various initiatives"?

Seriously...I'm not trying to be a dick...I mean don't get me wrong, I can be a dick...but I'm not right now. What the heck is this contract for? Are we replacing one of our current vendors? Are we supplementing one of our current vendors because they couldn't handle all the requirements? Why did we just pay Ciber an extra 6 million bucks?

Lagan seems to be a full service municipal software solution and I guess TDC is the service company for it....but what happened to all the shit we already paid for? In particular the 311 system?

I think maybe we should just forgo the Jetsons and revert back to the Flintstones. These Spacely Space Cogs are gonna break us.

UPDATE: I'm now being told that this contract is just for 2009 and it will shoot up to between $5 and $7 million in 2010. If there is a councilperson reading this, we need to find out what is going on here because it seems to me we're paying multiple companies for similar services. I may be wrong, but we deserve an explanation.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the city charter issue of moving moneys without authority:

I really, really wish people who care would start seriously advocating for a city manager form of government.

Citizens keep getting aggravated at Nagin, and all the very good reasons for that are detailed here and elsewhere literally ad nauseum, but we'll will just see this happen again. The only way this doesn't happen again in the future is if a future mayor gets a council like our prior pre-K councils, compliant, meek, apathetic or incapable, such that they don't bring it up.

I see none of this changing under Murray, Georges, or any other of the current crop of knuckleheads currently up for the job.

A possible fix would be creating a city manager who reports back to the Council about all aspects of the government. The City of Dallas and something like 120 of the nation's 200 largest cities employ that form of government, let's just go there and try to actually fix something.

Anonymous said...

- same anin

Btw, wasn't one of the expemsivo law firms that Nagin just hired up in DC the same firm that worked for the SWB???

Ricardo said...

Has anyone seen ANY outcome frome the Washington tech outfit that was supposed to PROVE the ineptness of the Louisiana Technology Council and it's audit of the City of New Orleans email servers?

Anonymous said...

People are crazy. People are completely batshit insane.

This is so far into beyond-the-beyond, it had me laughing to the point of tears, instead of getting mad.

Does that response mean I'm getting slightly "mystically cooler", increasing my personal Itutu a little? I hope so.

Thanks to you, AZ, to People Get Ready, to the T-P journalists, to Stacy Head and Shelley Midura, and to every person working on bringing all of this to light.

I think the people recommending a city manager might have something.

On the subject of IT contracts, it might be time for New Orleans to consider a communications strategy involving homing pigeons, fast runners, drums, bored old ladies, and some kids on bikes.

Anonymous said...

You may want to go back and look at that contract for Ciber's recent $6M. If you look at the date the original was 12/31/2010, that is scratched out and initialed by Fred Wild (city attorney)and penciled in is 12/31/2009. I think Nagin is just paying off his buddies. Also Ciber has told its IT staff that 12/31/2009 is their last day

Jason Brad Berry said...

holy shit you're right, sir.

I have post coming on this.

Anonymous said...

yer right the TDC contract has A LOT of crossover with the MSF contract in the IT solutions & services realm.

TDC's is much broader in scope, however. it covers capital projects and 311 in addition to the Office of Technology services.

yet its still unclear why there are two different vendors and contracts for the IT scope. it used to all just fall under VIT. if TDC was just for project management work thatd be one thing, but if ya read the contract youll see slots for anything & everything: developers, help desk, database, et cetera.

more waste, most likely, as there will be different groups trying to perform the same goals and perhaps even competing in or for project areas.

who knows why the mayor's office of technology (Boyd) went this route, especially with so little time left in da mayor's term. it's interesting to note TDC is based in Boyd's hometown of Washington, DC. more winning vendors equals more friends, mebbe?