Oracle out, Microsoft in for state e-mail project

It is absolutely unreasonable that taxpayer money is used to support a convicted antitrust felon like Microsoft.

Isn't there a federal law banning such deals with known criminal offenders?

What's really unreasonable is the continuing saga of IT mis-management and project overruns with technology at the state government level. While many would consider Microsoft a necessary evil in life, why wouldn't you just consolidate the servers, on a common platform (Exchange servers)like most of the free world and get over it. If all these IT mishaps occured in the private sector, I would hope there would be real consequences for those involved in the failure of the project.

Was the going with the Oracle project just a ploy to get Microsoft to lower their exobitant price?

Was going with the Oracle project just a ploy to get Microsoft to lower their exobitant price, from the start?

What IS unreasonable are the repeated wrong choices and clandenstine bid processes within government. This has nothing to do with Microsoft and EVERYTHING to do with incompetent appointees and cronyism.

There never is accountability for political operatives like Miszewski. Where does the buck stop Matt? How much more of our money needs to be flushed down the toilet to make Matt look good?

No person reading this release should be surprised at the wasted money that our government flushes down the toliet with this action. Citizens do nothing to stop it and government is unchecked. This is how America will fall.
P.K.

Who was it that stated that we had already migrated to the Oracle e-mail system and saved the state millions in the National Governor's report? Matt, Stephen or Jim? see http://www.nga.org/Files/pdf/0512Consolidationissuebrief.pdf

I feel badly for the folks at TUSC, the implementors of the solution that DLT contracted with, they will be left to flap in the wind.

It amazes me that CIO Matt Miszewski knows they can still save a $1 million when he states he doesn't even know how much he didn't know how much DOA staff time had been spent on the failed project. This project (not just the pilot) was scheduled have been completed well before Nov 2005. It is one of many state IT projects behind schedule. The taxpayers can't afford anymore of these "savings".

Curious that they don't specify the exact issues which they felt made the project a failure. Follow the money??

"He (Miszewski or Bablitch) told reporters on Friday that
he didn't know how much DOA staff time had been spent on
the project."
How about one of the newspapers making an "open-record" request for the statistics from the PTR system? This system is used by all Division of Enterprise Technology employees. It's use is mandatory within the division. With this system, the employees are required to complete a summary of the hours they spent on each of the projects they worked on for the pay period. The statistics are there for the asking.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see how many man hours were put in on this project over its duration?
Mr. Miszewski has a very good idea of how much DOA staff time has been put into this failed effort, because most of the people working on the project report directly to Miszewski or one of his subordinates. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did this fisaco cost the tax payers?

There must have been two teams for the email consolidation project because the original inter-agency team did NOT recommend OCS. They recommended that the State stay with Microsoft Outlook for the time being and have a Proof of Concept (POC) done on OCS. This team was having difficulties believing that OCS could really do what was needed for 40,000 users because OCS only had 4% of the email market share and all the unbiased research organizations, such as Gartner, did NOT recommend OCS for large-scale enterprise email systems. But that's NOT what Miszewski wanted so the the team was disbanded and the next thing the members heard was that OCS was chosen as the new State Email System. So who was on the "team" that Miszewski keeps referring to? Was there a second "team" hand-picked and influenced by Miszewski? There are many things that don't add up.

The recommendations of the Email Consolidation Team are listed on the Wisconsin.gov website which includes minutes from the meetings and their summary report. It provides some interesting comments about the direction this team was forced to take at the direction of the State's CIO. http://enterprise.state.wi.us/home/tlc/EMail/emailhome.htm
Provides some interesting

OCS was NOT in a pilotstage; it was in production and has been since it was forced into implementation by Miszewski last November. Everyone knew of all the problems with OCS long before it was forced into production but Miszewski insisted that it be put into production so he could get OCS operational. Someone should check out his relationships with Oracle and HP.

PTR is Project Time Reporting.

There are weekly time reports submitted by the contract staff showing how many hours they worked on this project. The DOA employee hours are a drop in the bucket compared to the contractor hours. There are dozens of contractors working on this. Look at these weekly time reports and see a few more hundred thousand dollars which were spent on this project.

The project was not a pilot when it was implemented in DOA. DOA people went live as the first customers. Hundreds of problems were reported to the help desk and it took weeks for the problems to be fixed. There is documentation on this.

Patrick Marley (Journal newspaper), do you realize there is a tremendous story here?

Definitely sounds bad, but as an offset to some of the hysterical comments above, check out a presentation by Mr. Miszewski from January 2006:

http://www.mediasite.com/Player.aspx?p=9661

Sounds like it was hardly his initial inclination to go with Oracle...
mark.

As one of the reporters who has written about this project for the Wisconsin State Journal, I would be interested to speak with any of you posting to this forum about possible follow-up stories on this or other areas concerning state IT work. Please feel free to contact me at pbrinkman@madison.com or by phone, 252-6145.

Thanks,

Phil Brinkman
Wisconsin State Journal

So, Oracle and the gov screwed this up from the start and MS is the villain? typical.

It is relatively easy to get a $12 million estimate down to $2.6 million. All one has to do is assume that everything will work the first time, that no testing will be necessary, that every decision will be made instantly and that absolutely nothing will ever have to change, be fixed or re-worked. Also assume the lowest possible price on all equipment and services and that no one will ever be sick a day or take vacation.

Unfortunately, with government mandates of “low bid wins”, these types of projects get through time and time again. What sort of comments would have been in the press had the CIO publicly said that $2.6 million was “too cheap”, and “let’s spend $12 million”? “Too good to be true” is not something that plays well in the press.

I think this is great! You can bet that unlike Oracle, Microsoft will put the resources behind making sure this implementation is a success and completed within a timely period. For those of us that run Exchange 2003 I think this seems like a no brainer. The system rocks, it is easy to deploy and integrates seemlessly with the existing domain. I've seen demos for Exchange 12 and amazing things are coming soon. The state will be glad they made this decision.

I sent these comments as part of a longer email to Rep
Pocan, May 27 2005, shortly after attending an email admin meeting to review OCS functionality. Everyone in that room knew is was junk and a waste of time.

Yesterday, I attended the administrator training session for the Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) system that will become the enterprise email system for Wisconsin government. This is a chunk of the SIS initiative to streamline government IT. I was astounded to see a system that is at least 4-5 years behind current technology. Attendees were glancing at each other and shaking their heads. This system will be a couple of giant steps backward for every agency in the state whether they are using Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Exchange. I bluntly asked how anyone could make the decision to put so much dependency on something so backward (remember I'm retiring so I don't care). The response was - "it was cheap"! (That fact is supported by many references on the web about Oracle giving it away to try and establish market share and play with the big boys in the email space.) Email is mission critical, the state needs to get its best deal but it is not a place to be cheap. Take these 3 words which often characterize management goals for IT projects - good, fast, cheap. You can pick any two, but you can't have all three. I'll bet they've already spent more money trying to make it work than they saved by not choosing a more up-to-date, robust, more easily managed, completely integrated system (the OCS post office and calendar are not integrated but separate products for example).

The product is so flawed and will be so expensive to manage at the desktop that its hard to comprehend the support nightmare looming on the horizon for all the IT staff in the agencies upon whom that task will fall. Their support plan is pretty much analagous to the phone company. They're responsible for everything up to where the wire goes into the house, once inside its your problem.

I'm not going to go into the details because it would serve no purpose here but if you're at all interested in raising questions I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. If I were a more organized person with some resources, I would as a taxpayer, go to an attourney and file a motion to enjoin DOA from proceeding with this implementation because they are wasting state tax dollars. Its that bad.

Anyone really has to wonder when HP produces full color ads featuring Matt and the Secretary giving testimonials.

Will DOA ever come clean on how much money the OCS project really cost? Email administrators and IT staff in state agencies outside of DOA argued from the beginning that OCS was a mistake. It took a year and a great deal of money to finally prove what most people already knew. OCS was a big mistake and a costly one. The public should demand an audit of this OCS project. We have a right to know how much Matt and his cronies get paid, and how much this OCS project cost including cost state employee staff time from all the state agencies. DOA isn’t the only agency that tied up staff with this failed project.

Failures of this magnitude and cost are not uncommon in Statewide IT projects. The public should demand an audit on this project, as well as the SIS initiative. These projects are sold as cost saving efforts, but true costs are never revealed. The taxpayers are getting ripped off, meanwhile out of state contractors are getting rich.

CRONYISM and GROUPTHINK

Miszewski has been irresponsibly pushing people and technologies solely to make a name for himself. He's positioning his "accomplishments" in order to secure a job in the private sector, after his appointment implodes. If he spent as much time trying to understand the technologies and/or "listening" to experience staff and vendors, as he does giving interviews, he might have had a better chance at succeeding.

What were the "insurmountable technical difficulties" that cropped up. This sounds like a MS lobbying effort, being that this was probably the biggest deal they lost to Oracle in the email / collaboration space. Who was the implementation team on this?

Miszewski is lying through his teeth. They spent thousands of man hours internally on this, easily cost the state millions in salaries that could have been better spent on training, or other activities. Virtually no state employees have received any training on the new Microsoft products, Windows XP, and Office 2003, and they literally waste hours each day wasting time trying to figure out simple tasks.

This continued Microsoft bashing has got to stop. You are only showing your ingnorance. Had any of you bashers ever supported pc's/servers, you would know Microsoft's are the only products that work properly upwards of 100% of the time. You get what you pay for. And to the fool named "R", these criminals, the Gates', have givin over 40 BILLION dollars to charity in the last five years. How much have you given???????????????

DOA screwed this up from day one, don't expect egomaniacs like Misewski, or Doyle, or the Microsoft bashers to admit that. They will go to their grave blaming other people for all the failures in their lives.

Here's another interesting post from a blog: http://www.wisopinion.com/blogs/abovethebelt/2006/03/matt-miszewski-international-man-of.html

Here is a link (www.nascio.org/scoring/files/State-WI-ExtendedEnterprise.doc) to Matt's nominating himself for an award from NASCIO in the category of State IT Management Initiatives.

Dear Mark:

Let's remember that the link you have was recorded after Matt knew OCS was going to be backed out. He was deliberately distancing himself from the decision. Try finding the video where he announced the initial OCS decision.

Mr. Stitt and the editor might interested that DOA just (last weekend) migrated back to Exchange and are seeing exactly the same issues they saw going to Oracle and at about the same rate and severity! I would hate to be the person handling all the call from upset users who expected something better!!

The simple may claim that the DOA migration was as bad going to exchange as it was going to OCS, but that is simply comments from the uninformed.

The OCS to Exchange migration had its glitches and issues, which 99% of them were caused by the flakiness of the data coming from OCS! Tools to migrate from OCS are almost non existent so there are many band aids, and creative work around to get a migration from OCS onto a reliable email system. The reason issues seemed similar was because the same POS email system was causing the problem - OCS.

Call volume from the OCS to Exchange migration was less than 15% that of what was the volume of the original OCS disaster. Nearly all issues encountered with the OCS to Exchange migration for DOA were resolved with week. With OCS the issues persisted from the day they were migrated to it, to the day they were migrated off... 6+ months.

Those who want to believe this was a disaster on the scale of OCS, need to get a bit more info.

What J from the June 19, 2006 post might like to know is that Microsoft recommended putting the DCs in the same exact V-LAN as the Exchange Servers, did the Server OS Team do that, Noooooooo. When the DCs were finally moved, the problems of lock-ups ceased. Exchange Server 2003 has been a huge success over OCS, no doubt! The first smart thing Sr. Leadership did was send Raffi Mesdjian back to DWD. Not only would Raffi lie through his teeth to Werner and Matt, but he would lie to the very technicians working on the system. You would have a meeting with him, describe what in OCS didn't work, and later that same day he would have a presentation to leadership, claiming all was well, and everything was running smoothly. Did he really think people were that stupid? Jovy, now theirs another liar. Never communicated the truth, he was Raffi's puppet. No wonder they booted him off the project too. Now Raffi gets all of his inside information from Jeff Ripp, who transferred from DWD to DOA.

This is interesting, there seems to be a lot of employees that have nothing better to do than whine and post garbage, and there seems to be some reporters who have nothing better to do than chase ambulances.

Neat. People are still posting to this article. LOL. I think posters are missing the main point. Regardless of problems and issues, the main question still ultimately is: does this email consolidation save money? Well, hardware and software costs appear to be much more expensive, but of course, DOA will say they are improving the quality of the infrastructure. It looks like they eliminated some positions while increasing support requirements. 99% of the email administration functions stayed at the agencies: adding and deleting mail boxes, distribution lists, outlook support. So 99% of the email administration tasks stayed the same and stayed with the agencies. The problem resolution environment increased in complexity a thousand fold. Let's say you have a room full of 10 two year olds. Would it be easier to manage them altogether, or would it be easier to separate them and manage them in much smaller groups. That is the appropriate metaphor operating with servers. There are a lot fewer variables in debugging an issue in a single email server LAN environment, then in a shared 19 email server WAN environment. That is what support staff at a small agency is facing: is it the routers? Which one? One or in combination? is it the servers? Which one? one or in combination? Essentially, DOA has created an incredibly complex environment for debugging any single issue. We would have been much better off, keeping the environment the way it was and reducing the number of support staff in that environment. Ultimately, agency staff will be assigned to perform these same email functions. Nothing will have been saved because none of the email support tasks went away or were reduced in complexity. The one task that is improved is hardware monitoring. Once every 4 or so years, the server needs to be replaced. Every so often, the server hardware has a problem. This is about 1 % of the support function that was improved. To DOA, 1 + 1 does indeed equal 3.

As a point of clarity well after the point. The Oracle/DLT bid was at 3.3 million without any cost representation for the Oracle servers, and with a disclaimer that after the initial discovery project, the final service fees would be identified. Berbee bid the project to implement Exchange with 3.6 million in OPTIONAL hosted services and Windows and Exchange licenses that the state already knowingly owned 85% of at an additional 3.9 million. Subtract the 7.5 million for those two factors as any serious evaluator of price would have done and the Exchange bid was 5.5 million. Add in the fact that DLT bid with an open-ended service fee for implementation and the real comparison should have been 5.5 million for Exchange vs. 3.3 million to infinity for OCS.

The bid process at the state is broken, allowing for irresponsible bids to be selected under the guise of "lowest bidder." The state bidding laws allow for the "lowest responsible bidder" to be selected even if they are not the lowest-cost bidder. In order to select the lowest responsible bidder, bids must be reviewed and questioned thoroughly by responsible buyers. This does not seem to have been the case with this project. After nearly an entire term at his appointment, ask the state CIO how many desktops and servers exist in the state and what software and versions they run, and he can still not answer that. How can he state consolidation savings that will be realized when he doesn't responsibly evaluate bids for consolidation or have a definite understanding of what exists to be consolidated? And where did the Oracle sales rep who led the charge for Oracle into the OCS mess end up? Believe it or not, she is at Microsoft.