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November 15, 2011 By Matt Williams
One reason is that they have a real impact on delivering services to citizens. Doug Robinson, the executive director of NASCIO, called old UI systems the “poster child” for why modernization is important. The economic recession caused an overwhelming spike in unemployment claims, and the increased demand crashed states’ back-end databases and websites. New York, Florida and Ohio were among the states that fell victim to the surge. A modern system, perhaps using cloud computing, would’ve been able to cope with that elasticity and scale, Robinson said.
Old systems running on ancient programming languages also struggle to accommodate changing business requirements or legislative mandates. Modifications can require weeks or months of programming time — causing delays that can draw the ire of lawmakers and the public. California’s Employment Development Department experienced the real-world consequences legacy systems can have, when in 2009, Congress repeatedly extended the length of time individuals could draw unemployment benefits. Each extension required line-by-line coding changes in the department’s 1970s-era UI system. During one particularly complex change, unemployment checks were delayed for weeks as COBOL programmers toiled over the modifications.
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The sputtering economy has put more workload onto UI systems simply because more unemployed workers are seeking benefits. MMIS reform also is viewed as a bigger priority than it once was because of the Barack Obama administration’s focus on health-care reform.
Consequently back-end systems like ERP might be a lower priority right now in the eyes of lawmakers. For this reason, Andrews said ERP might be the third in line behind UI and MMIS, which are citizen-facing. Roughly a third of the states haven’t modernized their ERP systems since the mid-1990s, Andrews said. Those states want to upgrade their ERP, but they don’t have the money to do so.
No matter where money is spent, many state CIOs are clamoring for change on how the systems are funded by the federal government. Specifically states want more “administrative flexibility” on the requirements attached to IT dollars spent on federally funded, state-administered programs like UI and MMIS. The Obama administration recently ordered federal agencies to review these rules and alter them where appropriate.
Doug Robinson, executive director of NASCIO, said funding rules should encourage collaboration, but the current rules have the reverse effect. States now receive less federal funding if they share systems. It’s relatively easy, in some cases, to get the upfront capital from the federal programmatic agencies for a new system, Robinson said, but trying to replace them is tougher because of the funding rules. That’s one reason states are holding on to aging systems.
Utah CIO Steve Fletcher said the feds should find a way to let states share technology, therefore cutting costs for everyone. “There should be a better way to approach this rather than build it 50 times, because it’s pretty much the same system in all 50 states. Build it once and distribute it,” Fletcher said. “They don’t incentivize states to do the sharing.” |
Another drawback of old systems is security. Assuring the code on a legacy system can be done, but it’s difficult. They were built before the advent of the Internet, so they were never intended to be connected online. “So you have that classic ‘lipstick on a pig’ situation where you put that Web service presentation layer in front of an old legacy environment,” Robinson said. “That can cause added complexity and offers weaker security than a modern application portfolio with seamless security built in since day one.”
Andrews and Russell added that legacy systems also don’t have the functionality needed to provide good data reporting, and have a tendency to hide data so that it never finds the light of day. Old systems can hinder government transparency. “We have data across all these disparate systems, but because they’re old and because we haven’t implemented newer technologies that have this functionality, it sits in those systems,” Russell said, “and we’re not able to pull the data to make better business decisions on behalf of providing services.”
“Technology is a predictor for how we do business, and if we’re not changing that technology, then we do business the same way we’ve always done it,” she added.
The appetite for upgrades to legacy systems appears to be present. An annual survey of state CIOs released in October from NASCIO said that more than half of the respondents were planning to replace their state’s legacy MMIS as health-care reform continues forward. But this effort will require major federal funding, according to NASCIO, and “getting those funds from federal government with its own budget problems could be problematic.” The Center for Digital Government’s MMIS survey found that five states are in the RFP planning process and six states said they will be completely replacing their existing legacy MMIS.
A 2009 Gartner research brief reported that some type of ERP activity was under way in 27 of 37 states surveyed, whether that be planning or a recent implementation. States were planning to spend from $30 million to $120 million on ERP, depending on the scope of the project and the state’s size. But some of these ERP projects were put on hold as states ran into financial hardship the past few years. Now there are two or three RFPs coming out each year, suggesting that ERP implementations have slowed.
The will is there, so what does the future look like? The consensus seems to be that states can no longer afford to develop new systems or modernize existing ones on their own.
The price tag is too high, and it takes too long. Furthermore, state-to-state, their systems share most of the same functionality, so developing systems that are shared among multiple states is feasible. A new model centered on “multistate consortia” is emerging that may be the way forward for replacing MMIS, UI and other big-ticket systems.
A few years ago, in the wake of the recession that stretched state UI systems beyond their limits, the U.S. Department of Labor awarded seed money to study the feasibility of shared UI systems that could be used by multiple states. The money also went toward writing requirement sets and laying the groundwork for states to work together. That effort has now reached the development phase after the Department of Labor awarded $128 million in September to three consortia of states that are planning to share a single UI system.
The consortia are arranged geographically. Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota and Wyoming are working together, as are Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A third consortium is also starting among Maryland, West Virginia and Vermont.
When you combine four states, the collection of expertise gets them to the critical mass they need for a successful project. There’s very rarely one state that has enough staff versed in COBOL, Java and Oracle — but together, they do. “They have demonstrated that the pulling together of resources has had an enormous benefit — it really has,” said Lou Ansaldi, technology director of the Information Technology Support Center, which is affiliated with the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.
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in what way is the print icon on this page useful? It sure would be nice to get all of the 5 page story in one browser window.
Good article overall. Not really any earth-shattering news for those familiar with government systems. One glaring omission is how government salaries for IT pros have lagged far behind private industry. This causes the lack of new blood to come into government work. Also, the focus needs to be on how to better meet business needs than on how to replace mature systems, or you could replace your 1995 Mercedez with a 2011 Yugo!
Fix it because it's not working, not because it's old! Btw, how old is old?
We fly aircraft that are significantly older than these IT systems and operate them safely. Somehow we manage to maintain old aircraft and find pilots to fly them. Sounds like IT has a management problem. There's nothing wrong with expecting a young programmer to learn COBOL and IBM High Level Assembler. Management needs to see to it that training in those languages is available. Colleges will teach subjects that help their graduates find jobs. Management needs to work with college administrations to make them aware of their needs.
Everytime someone wants to justify spending millions of dollars on replacing "old systems" they serve up a story like this. They never mention that the mainframe computer that the "old code" runs on is usually only a few years old (system z), it probably has a modern enterprise-level database (like DB2)and it can easily have a modern web 2.0 presentation layer added through websphere and javascript code. Also any good coder should be able to write both procedural and object-oriented code.
Age of the system means absolutely nothing. What is important is how it was written and how it's been maintained. This artile leads the reader to believe any system older than 10 years is useless, has never been changed, and must obviously be tossed out. Old COBOL code was being replaced by new VB6 10 years ago. Today that "New" VB6 code is unsupported by Microsoft and has to be replaced. While that "Old" COBOL code would still be supported by IBM.
Mainframe technology has become underappreciated. Sure relational databases add a dimension beyond flat record structure and java / web interfaces have lots of flash and dazzle - but don't be fooled, ANY system is going to require maintainace support. Interfaces to older systems should not be dismissed if they suit the business need. THAT is what the focus should be, not merely upgrading just because newer whiz bang stuff exists in the market. But look at where Ms. Russel comes from, private industry, of course she will have this perspective - and its not necessarily bad, as long as upgrades are really necessary and cost effective. Sharing systems among states has been going on in pockets here and there for some time already. The best fit is where systems are similar and flexible enough to allow for state law differences. I'm not saying change isn't good, but if a system works and meets its intended objective and does not cost more than 2% of its original construction cost to maintain it. Then maybe that older system is OK to keep around a while longer. We seem to wast a lot of money in this country throwing away perfectly good stuff. Many times because elected officials decide it is time to change things whether it makes any sense or not. Change for the sake of change is wasteful. Lets fix the roads, bridges and dams before we repave the internet superhighway, we have enough traffic out there already.
EDD's COBOL went live in the late 80's. It was never a 70's era system. EDD began replacing COBOL with Visual Basic (eventually .NET) in 2005, not 2009, and it was the decision of the CIO, who was astoundingly incompetent, not due to any COBOL programming shortage. EDD's COBOL programmers never caused a delay in processing any UI checks. All delays to UI check-processing in the past 20 years have been directly attributed to incompetent managers, bad process, and disorganization beyond the control of programmers. By 2007, EDD managers, under the direct micromanagement of the CIO, had bungled most of the object-oriented development projects for which they had received ~$30Million. They did this by hiring and promoting a vast array of stupendously unqualifed staff and managers. A personnel sea change hit EDD's IT branch. The CIO, now hopelessly mired in a cesspool of incompetence created by himself, having rendered EDD's IT branch capable of Help Desk and Hardware/Software Support, only, began to request additional sums to bring in vendors, and the flood gates opened, and haven't closed since. $300Million and counting... all to replace COBOL? Heads should be rolling. Lots of heads.
I work for the Office of Information Technology for the State of Colorado. Prior to Ms Russell's appointment, the state of Colorado's documented track record for replacing old systems has been a disaster. Hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on failed replacement systems. Who said COBOL is bad and .Net is good? It is an illusion that you think that one state is the same as another. That is simply untrue. You cannot find some vanilla system that is one size fits all. The customizing for each state is horrendously expensive. The only solution is simply to replace each system little by litte, take each needle off the pine tree one at a time while shoring up your current COBOL system and perhaps rewriting those modules in a more elegant fashion in the meantime. Try automating business rules over the life of a current production system in some clunky ERP. Track records for ERP systems is that they fail over 75% of the time accoding to Gartner. I would not bet my agency on those percentages, but who am I to know, I have only been in IT for 34 years in both the privte and public sectors, in high tech, telecommunications, banking, and state government, and there is still more COBOL out there than IT management is willing to let on. That is the dark and dirty secret.
Use the Safari browser and just click on the "Reader" button in the URL window. A beautifully-formatted, printer-ready (and easily scrolled and read) window pops up. All that's missing is the clutter and ads ;-)