Agencies' Y2K haste makes waste

Sunday, October 08, 2000

By TED WENDLING

PLAIN DEALER BUREAU

COLUMBUS - When state officials decided two years ago to buy a $1.6 million computer system that would integrate the licensing, enforcement and continuing-education data kept by Ohio's 21 regulatory boards, they expected the License 2000 system to be up and running by Dec. 31, 1999.

Now, looking at a proposed launch date of Jan. 12, 2001, Thomas A. Dilling, executive director of the State Medical Board, said his office has its own pet name for the new system: Molasses 2000.

"We also call it License 2001," he said.

Maryland-based System Automation Corp. had promised to roll out its occupational licensing system by the end of 1999 to allay state officials' concerns about a potential Year 2000 technological meltdown. But as 2000 begins to merge into 2001, state and company officials are still quarreling over money and system specifications, and officials at some of the boards are grumbling that System Automation's vaunted "complete licensing solution for the new millennium" may not be worth the wait.

"What really bothers me is that we bought an early '90s design," said Michael R. Jacobson, administrative assistant at the Ohio Board of Registration for Professional Engineers & Surveyors and an amateur Web and database programmer. "We're going to roll it out in the early 2000s sometime and we're going to be stuck with it until 2020.

"When you're talking computer systems, this thing's going to be, in my opinion, obsolete. It has no Web connectivity. It doesn't have all kinds of things we've requested."

With contracts to install License 2000 in 21 states, System Automation has "the state-of-the-art licensing system available on the market today," said company President Charles Rubin. An Internet upgrade is on the horizon, he said. After being customized to meet Ohio's needs, he added, License 2000 will accommodate the needs of boards ranging in size from the Medical Board, with an annual budget of $6 million, to the $102,000-a-year Sanitarian Registration Board.

But while information systems officials in most of the states that have purchased License 2000 report they are satisfied with the system, other states have experienced problems similar to Ohio's.

After long negotiations, state officials in Washington walked away after being unable to reach an agreement with the company on system modifications. Utah's $1.4 million system is still being debugged after System Automation originally promised to launch it by June 30, 1999. And in Maine, the company and the state are in court after exasperated Maine officials canceled their $974,000 contract, accusing the company of missing deadlines and demanding an extra $600,000.

"The contractor expanded quite rapidly," said Gary Schricker, chief of technology for the Washington Department of Health. "As of March or April, 19 different states had bought that package, and they just couldn't keep up."

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Rubin acknowledged having difficulties in each of those states.

"No matter where we've had slippages or controversies in what was being delivered, never did we not see the whole project through and deliver the complete solution," he said. "In the case of Ohio DAS ... we're going to deliver the completed solution with the exact same fixed-price dollar value that was awarded to us back in '98."

'Hot Buttons' If so, it won't be for lack of asking. After obtaining a special Y2K competitive-bid waiver that allowed DAS to give System Automation a $1.6 million no-bid contract, company executives have continued to hold their hands out.

"I'm starting to hear the contractor's three favorite words - 'Not in scope,'" Jacobson wrote in a memo titled "The Peanut Gallery Speaketh" last July. "For the newbies, that phrase translates to, 'You want it, you pay extra.'"

In November, after a conversation with DAS fiscal officer Robert A. Newsom, Jacobson complained to fellow board officials that System Automation was asking for an extra $300,000.

"Bob and his boss are dead set against going to the Controlling Board for more money," he wrote. "Feels would be a disaster with the current hot buttons 'unbid contracts' and 'Y2K waiver.'"

DAS officials say they have been conscientious stewards of the public's money. They said they have resisted the company's demands for more money and defended the hiring of Thomas J. Betts, a private consultant, to manage the project.

A series of contracts Betts has signed since March 1998 call for DAS to pay him up to $481,000 - nearly one-third of the licensing system's total cost. Initially hired for $95 an hour, he has received two raises and now makes $120 an hour, a rate DAS officials say is modest for a project of this magnitude. Betts would not discuss his work.

"Spending this kind of money can save us far more than we're spending," said Neal Kaffen, administrator of DAS' Management Information Systems office.

Correspondence files show that DAS and System Automation officials have blamed each other for the delays. In recent interviews, however, both Kaffen and Rubin said setbacks were to be expected in complex projects and attributed the delays to board officials' inability to reach a consensus.

Unlike most states, which have an umbrella agency that oversees regulatory boards, Ohio's boards are autonomous.

Dilling said the boards simply asked for the same types of capabilities the current computer system offers. "Most, if not all, of the directors have been disappointed with the communication with the people in charge of this project," he said.

Serious disagreements between board officials and DAS began in 1997.

DAS officials hired a former DAS deputy director, Jerry W. Hammett, for $38,000 to study the boards' needs. The document was intended as a blueprint for the state's request for bids.

Hammett's September 1997 requirements study, however, created a furor. Widely criticized as substandard, his 92-page report, which included 60 pages of computer screen shots, focused on the inadequacies of the boards' computer systems but spent little time analyzing a potential solution.

"I think we all feel that he took our work and just rehashed it," said Christopher H. Logsdon, executive secretary of the Ohio Respiratory Care Board.

Satisfied with study Hammett did not return phone calls, but Kaffen said DAS was satisfied with his study, even though it failed to achieve enough consensus among the boards to write a bid request. Several more months passed and, by early 1998, Kaffen said, it was clear that time was running short.

Saying the boards faced an imminent Y2K problem, DAS officials obtained waivers that allowed them to award no-bid contracts in 1998 to System Automation and to Betts, who had helped Hammett write the controversial 1997 study. And the first thing System Automation did was to do another requirements study, re-interviewing officials at each of the boards.

Although Rubin said Hammett's study was useful, he said his company would have delivered License 2000 by the end of 1999 if it had not had to spend so much time getting board officials to compromise. For instance, he said, License 2000 is designed to give each individual with a license a single entry in the database, whether the person has one license or five. Ohio's boards, Rubin said, wanted to be able to create separate entries if, for instance, someone was licensed as a psychologist and as a social worker.

"I wouldn't say that anybody is at fault here, either the state of Ohio or System Automation," Rubin said. "It just takes a while to get all these groups together and to get them to agree on one common system."

Kaffen acknowledged that the many delays are difficult to justify.

"I understand," he said. "I would say the same thing if I was reading the paper. Systems development just takes time. These things are more complex than you might think."

E-mail: twendling@plaind.com

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 08, 2000