LANSING – The state has spent tens
of millions of dollars upgrading computer systems since Governor
Rick Snyder took office, but, as with prior attempts to improve the system,
the changes have not always gone as smoothly as many would like.
But state officials said this time
they are keeping track of what is going wrong and right to try to make future
upgrades smoother.
The struggles are part of an ongoing
evolution of information technology for the state, Technology, Management and
Budget Director
David Behen, who started with the state as chief information officer, said
in a recent interview with Gongwer News Service.
That evolution started under former
Governor John Engler with the creation of the Department of Information
Technology, which consolidated all state IT programs and, Behen said, is now
saving the state money over what it would spend with each agency running its
own systems.
“One of things we’ve got to get
better at is not focusing on outputs but outcomes,” Behen said. “I
don’t really care if we deployed 2,000 iPads. How has that impacted the goals
of our partner agencies?”
Some state employees, though, have
not been pleased with how some recent deployments have affected them.
The most visible of the recent of
the recent changes has been the Michigan Statewide Automated Child Welfare
Information System, intended to streamline case management, but instead the
target of much criticism from case workers.
Legislators, too, have been critical
of the development process.
The system so far has cost the state
about $64.97 million and been in operation since April 30, 2014, but is still
facing some fixes.
“We’re going through the system
right now to identify defects that need to be resolved and also reaching out
and working with system users to make the system better to use,” James
McFarlane, director of customer service for the Department of Technology,
Management and Budget, said in a recent interview with Gongwer News Service.
“The system works. It’s a big
system; it’s got a large learning curve; and it’s got a big user base,”
Eric Swanson, senior deputy director over the DTMB Center for Shared Solutions,
said.
McFarlane and Swanson said the
system was written using agile development techniques that allow for smaller
updates than some prior systems.
And Swanson said the state has
implemented training to help workers master the new system.
A worker in the child welfare
program, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from
department management, acknowledged DTMB and the developer, Unisys, are working
on the problems workers are finding, but said the fixes are not always
consistent.
“Every time they do a fix, it
creates other problems,” the person said. “It’s like a big game of
whack-a-mole.”
The worker said, at least for
Children’s Protective Services, people are able to use the system.
“In general when it comes to
CPS, you can fumble your way through it,” the person said. “We’ve
kind of come up with a lot of workarounds on our own.”
For instance, the system now allows
for printing reports, but workers are still having to copy those reports and
format them in a word processing document because they system does not format
them well.
“They all look like one giant
run-on sentence,” the person said. “It doesn’t print well. It doesn’t
look right when professional people are reading these things.”
And the system is still not properly
issuing payments to service providers, the person said.
“A month ago, they had all the
foster care workers come in and do mandatory overtime to do the payments,”
the person said in a June interview. “In another five months, we’re going
to make everyone come in again and manually enter payments.”
DTMB spokesperson Caleb Buhs said
there are still some isolated issues with payments from the system, but that
overall payments are coming out of the system properly.
“We have aggressively addressed
any issues with payments, and the payment system is now functioning well,”
he said. “That said, there are still isolated incidents in which a payment
is not entered, entered incorrectly, etc., and we address these immediately as
foster parents notify us of any issues.”
He said the issues with printing
reports have been resolved. “We will continue to engage in discussion with
users to modify reports to better meet their needs and improve work flow,”
he said.
The CPS worker took particular issue
with statements from department leadership that any of the problems were the
result of the learning curve for employees.
“The reason the problems are
there is because your system isn’t working, but you blame it on the
workers,” the person said.
There was training as required under
the contract, but not on the system as currently in use.
“What people were trained on
and when it came out was a year’s worth of improvements and changes,” the
person said. At the time the person spoke with Gongwer, there had been little
training on the final system.
This story was published by Gongwer
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