Texas Warns IBM of Outsourcing Contract Failures

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You know that trademarked “Don’t Mess With Texas” saying? IBM might end up learning the meaning of that phrase...the hard way.

The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) warned IBM on Friday that its $863 million data center outsourcing contract with the state is in jeopardy. A seven-page "notice to cure" from Texas CIO Karen Robinson asserts that IBM has repeatedly underperformed and undelivered on the seven-year contract signed in 2006. The notice gives the company 30 days to fix the problems.
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The massive data center consolidation, which was expected to be finished in December 2009, is less than 12 percent complete, according to the DIR. Just five agencies are completely consolidated, and consolidation efforts are under way in only five more, the department said. There are no schedules in place for consolidation of the remaining 22 agencies, the DIR added.
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And IBM's response to that performance:
"IBM has fulfilled its obligations under the contract and today's action by DIR was unnecessary and unjustified,"
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shows why the people in the state of Texas just wasted $863 million on the idea that somehow private enterprise is 'better' than government at getting things done cheaply.
 
Ualdayan said:
shows why the people in the state of Texas just wasted $863 million on the idea that somehow private enterprise is 'better' than government at getting things done cheaply.
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Nothing with IBM is done cheaply and quickly, the company has so much bloat its not even funny
 
I hope something is done but I doubt it, I can almost guarantee it takes longer than 30 days for IBM to come up with a real response to what was sent to them. Rather than the quick one-liner sent back to them by a employee.I've dealt with IBM on numerous occasions when trying to service one of their warrantied computers and I swear to god I could only get a hold of 2 people total, and they were the only ones to ever answer the phone and neither one seemed to know anything about technical repair of any kind. IBM needs to break itself back down into pieces and get itself reorganized.
 
Anything IBM is a bloated world of horrible crapware. But, why wouldn't it be? The slower it runs the more (IBM) hardware you have to buy, and it's not like you can just leave IBM. Once you're infected with IBM it's either a full recoding of your software or more IBM.
 
osrk said:
but it's a private company!!!!!! IT HAZ TO BE BETTER THAN THE GOVERZMENT!!!
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Wow, that's a truly astounding argument. If that's all you have to denigrate public companies with, you might want to try harder next time.

Considering neither you or I have ever seen a free market I think it's safe to say this scenario has little to do with the how a truly free business situation would work (for example, corporations would not exist as they do today).
 
No surprise here. In fact, I'm surprised we haven't seen more of these stories at this point.

After all, we are living in the "Age of Incompetence".

Combine that with the bureaucracy of IBM...and voila!

(Sure, I'm glossing over a lot, that's without question. I still feel we can chalk this one up to the Age we're living.)
 
You could trust IBM to handle such a project in the past but they have really gone down hill in the past 10 years. It's not a company that can be trusted to build out infastructure anymore because they outsource all the projects to 3rd party's who fly under the IBM partner banner.

For what Texas needed they could have hired developers, project managers and created a new department to handle it all internally much cheaper then what IBM is doing it for.

Texas got suckered into a horrible situation and it will not be fixed cheap or easy.
 
Ualdayan said:
And IBM's response to that performance:


shows why the people in the state of Texas just wasted $863 million on the idea that somehow private enterprise is 'better' than government at getting things done cheaply.
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You have a FUNDAMENTAL misunderstanding of free market economics and ideas if you think for even one second that you statement has any meaning in any context.

One of the main ideas of a free market is so that companies that fail to maintain their end of the bargain can be held liable and if needed, go bankrupt. If you do not hold the company you are doing business with up to your expectations, then it is not free market capitalism.
 
Bet I know what really happened, and it's something that often happens when outsourcing happens.

The two companies meet, and decide on what needs to be delivered on both sides, what outcome the state wants and what date it is to be delivered. However the state drags it's feet in providing the necessary info for IBM to start or just out right assumes that IBM is the experts so they know best. This results in the tool being half finished, or is so hard to use that it disrupts workflow. Another alternative is the state dropping in every other month or so wanting an additional feature added but not realizing that such changes increase the deliver time or are too late to make.

The state can't give the proper info because they probably fired all the people who would know already, or they don't want to help because it's helping their replacements. And IBM isn't helping by telling the state no on some of it's requests or staying on them to provide proper data/usage guidelines because they are afraid of losing the contract.

Free market or bureaucracy really has nothing to do with it, it's all due to disruption to how it was done before.
 
I work in the IT shop for one of their bigger customers, and we are working ditching most of their stuff for open source. They are going to continue to feel the pain over the coming years unless they change it up.

I'll still give DB2 props on transaction processing !
 
The only way to discourage outsourcing of tech jobs is to place a reasonably large federal tax on wages paid overseas. Texas, sit.

IMO, we should encourage outsourcing whenever possible. If the job can be done equally well by someone for $15,000/year, instead of $60,000/year state side, I say hire the man for $15,000. Hell, that guy will probably live better on the $15k/year job, in his country, than the man making $60k/year in the states.
 
I give props to Lotus Notes 8.5, it has turned into a really great product. I currently run a 3 server cluster for a customer, its solid and can perform a lot of roles in a company

but once you plunge fully into Notes, you never get out lol
 
Ryokurin said:
Bet I know what really happened, and it's something that often happens when outsourcing happens.

The two companies meet, and decide on what needs to be delivered on both sides, what outcome the state wants and what date it is to be delivered. However the state drags it's feet in providing the necessary info for IBM to start or just out right assumes that IBM is the experts so they know best. This results in the tool being half finished, or is so hard to use that it disrupts workflow. Another alternative is the state dropping in every other month or so wanting an additional feature added but not realizing that such changes increase the deliver time or are too late to make.

The state can't give the proper info because they probably fired all the people who would know already, or they don't want to help because it's helping their replacements. And IBM isn't helping by telling the state no on some of it's requests or staying on them to provide proper data/usage guidelines because they are afraid of losing the contract.

Free market or bureaucracy really has nothing to do with it, it's all due to disruption to how it was done before.
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Honestly I have to agree with this, it's by far the most likely scenario.
 
IBM sucks so bad... we've outsourced our helpdesk, server support, programmers all to IBM and now it's a friggin joke. You call the helpdesk and you get someone with NO NONE ZILCH ZIP NADA ZERO technical skill who tries to solve your problem by reading thru a book: PDG (Problem Determination Guide).

And when you got end users (who themselves are not technical) who call in saying "I can't get my "X" report to print like it used to" and the actual problem is the as400 printer driver needs changed (X is an as400 application that prints directly to an IP printer) because they just swapped the printer out from a Xerox to a Ricoh, the end user spends an hour and a half going thru the motions of pointless un-problem-related bullshit like deleting a printer and reinstalling it, reboot the computer, reset your as400 login password, reboot the computer again, do a little dance.. oh its not working well I'm at the end of my PDG I will send your ticket to Printer support... who doesn't have a fucking clue what the problem really is either. A week later the ticket gets transferred to my queue "PC Support". I ask "what changed" "well we got this new printer.." Call up the as400 guy, give him the queue name, he changes driver, 5 minutes later it's fixed. And the end user is just pissed off and frustrated, rightfully so.

IBM is also known for transferring tickets into dead helpdesk ticket queues, the wrong group, not updating the user's information or picking the wrong user so even tho I am in one city/state they pick the name of a user who is actually 10 states over but whose name is really close, but then whoever gets the ticket has to do some detective work and try to figure out who the actual caller really was...

I could go on all night...
 
Ualdayan said:
And IBM's response to that performance:


shows why the people in the state of Texas just wasted $863 million on the idea that somehow private enterprise is 'better' than government at getting things done cheaply.
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LOL @ you equating corruption and incompetence in government contracting with "private enterprise." Yes, when a business is insulated from competitive forces because a governmental element has intervened, things don't go well. It's a lot easier to get away with fucking around when you have government clients instead of private ones.
 
Related to Texas and computers....

I'm surprised this didn't make front page news a couple weeks ago
Broken Water Main Takes Out Dallas City Records Servers

According to local media, a 2008 audit recommended that the county remedy its lack of a failover site for disaster recovery, but than no action was taken on the study after a few attempts at building such a capability fell through. Fortunately, the county does regularly back up its data.
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I was down in Austin for 7 Months working for IBM at one of the state agency's for this project. After my first two weeks on the job, I knew that it was a sinking ship. I hauled ass as soon as I could.

IBM spread itself way to thin, I not once in the entire time I worked there, saw my direct supervisor. I have to say it was like that episode of Seinfeld, where George was working at Kruger industrial smoothing.

Co-worker: Hey, the backups out at Eagle Pass are failing again.
Me: I'm not to worried about it.
 
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