News

State: IT failures due to oversight

A government task force examining recent failures in technology projects reported Tuesday that a lack of oversight was the largest contributing factor to gaffes wasting taxpayer dollars.

The Speaker’s Task Force on State Information Technology Failures delivered a letter to Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, outlining its recommendation, the product of research and public input since the task force was commissioned last summer.

“[The task force] was charged with an important assignment: examining what went wrong with recently-failed state IT projects, and determining solutions which would protect taxpayer dollars in the future,” said the task force’s chair, Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Ashwaubenon, in a statement.

To improve oversight of IT projects, the task force recommended reinstating the defunct Joint Committee on Information Policy and Technology. According to Rep. Louis Molepske, D-Stevens Point, the committee was reinstated in the Senate, and the commission called on Huebsch to do the same in the Assembly.

“Individuals charged with managing computer software projects and the like did not do a very good job transferring their IT project responsibilities and procedures,” Molepske said. “There was no stopgap procedure to keep the data flowing.”

Molepske said the task force spent time looking into projects, including a failed computer payroll system at the University of Wisconsin System that cost $24 million.

“We spent several millions of dollars, and after it was spent, we got nothing,” Molepske said. “There is nothing the taxpayer could look at or hold to see what that money was spent on.”

The letter to the speaker also mentioned some issues had been addressed in the budget, citing provisions “aimed at curbing the culture of mismanagement which facilitated the waste of tax dollars on IT projects.”

Molepske said in addition to lack of oversight, the projects had been plagued with overspending.

“It is my hope that the failures in the past would not be repeated and that there would be executive sponsors of all those projects and the projects will be closely monitored, … and there will be protocol put in place if the bills coming due are greater than were expected,”

Molepske said.

However, Molepske said past problems had gone as far back as the time of Tommy Thompson’s governorship.

“You can’t really point the finger at one governor or Department of Administration head,” he said.