So, after shelling out roughly a $132 million for a computerized accounting and payroll system that—in addition to being absurdly expensive—seems to have the added advantage of NOT WORKING, how did our ever-impressive school district decide to rectify the situation? According to this morning’s LA Times editorial, district supt. David Brewer plans to give Deloitte Consulting (the company that bollixed everything up in the first place) another $9.6 million to sort things out.
You could call it an Accounting Surge.…or throwing good money after bad. Or just call it intolerably, inexcusably stupid.
Now I see California as a land of opportunity for accountants. If I can be paid millions to mess up and millions more to fix it, then open up the Golden Gates!
Maybe Pokey can shed some light on LASUD’s experience with a system’s overhaul. Every time I’ve been in, near, or by a systems overhaul on this scale (or, near this scale), these kinds of problems are anticipated. When it involves money (social services checks, payroll, and the like) the problems are particularly fraught with peril. When it comes to student data (enrollment, admissions, transcripts) it’s a muddle but tends to produce fewer catastrophic results. Seems like there are always “bugs” that teams spend years unearthing, and then grappling with, to produce fixes or work-arounds. The last one I’m aware of took three years to ramp up, and the agency has spent the last five years trying to make it do what it was supposed to do when it first went “live.” As I understand it, it’s not as simple as moving your email/address book from say, Outlook Express to Thunderbird. That little maneuver took me a month. Obviously, I’m no genius – hardly, even literate in this regard. But for a large system, like LASUD, the folks responsible for getting it up and running, feared precisely this kind of scenario – took as many steps and installed as many safeguards as possible – and, then held their breath. Apparently, it didn’t go well. For the systems people on the receiving end, I’ve heard them respond, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” to software sellers claims for seamless transition. It’s another argument for fracturing LASUD down to manageable size units.
Big and StupiderER or Small and Simple
Does it make you wonder, how the other small school districts could manage to pay their teachers at all if it is so difficult to do. It is real simple, smaller school districts do things simpler.
Small districts don’t have a “LAUSD WAY†of doing things; they just implement the system the way it comes out of the box. They don’t need to hire a team of experts each at $300/hour to customize a new system until it looks like the 40 year old system it is meant to replace and barely works at all.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that Brewer is looking like more and more like an overmatched hack with every passing day. The general lack of political interest in fixing our school system never ceases to astonish me.
“…. $300/hour to customize a new system until it looks like the 40 year old system it is meant to replace and barely works at all.”
LOL, Pokey. That’s *exactly* how it goes. And, the ‘experts’ tell me that by the time it’s relatively bug-less it may not even have half the fields of the 40 year old system it replaced, never mind that it doesn’t work half as well. Of course, those folks are simply told that they’re too inflexible to appreciate the new and improved system, and too resistant to learning something new. I’ve been told that these transitions have more to do with the company’s withdrawal of technical support than anything else. Sort of sounds like ‘planned obsolesce’ to me… but what the heck do I know.
It’s bells and whistles all the way down.
Mavis, Brewer may in fact be an over matched hack, but I’m beginning to think that the sheer size and scope of this district might over match anyone. At this point I’m not sure that even the bureaucrats-par-excellence, or logistical experts, at the Pentagon could manage this beast. I’m not automatically death on large districts. Economies of scale are real. But, with irregular inputs, and a systematized production process, irregular outputs are virtually guaranteed. Organic systems just don’t behave like widgets. Micro-breweries vs Anheuser-Busch comes to mind as an example.
I am always amused at those who truly sell computerization to an unsuspecting clientelle. No one seems to remember the old phrase “GIGO” (garbage in – garbage out for you young squirts). Whe I was a kid, in the ’50s, my dad could, prior to shipment to a new duty station make out an allotment request and have it processed by the company clerk in 3 days. Then he would be gone for a period of time and the Army would send his check (or what ever amount the allotment called for) to mom and everything was hunky-dory. Then, the Army went to computers/data processors and you had to get the allotment request in a minimum of 40 days prior to it going into effect (and even then it got screwed up half the time). The problem then, is as it is now, the systems are fabulous, but those putting the data in are often the worst paid, lowest employees on the totem pole and have seldom been trained in the grand scheme of things. Good report Celeste, interesting if not maddening to those of you living in L.A.
LINK: Do away with public schools
Government is inept at running schools. It should subsidize education for needy students, then get out of the way.
I’m with you on the enormity of the task, Listner. I’ve just been hearing stories that suggest Brewer is more of a photo-op guy than somebody who is really prepared to dig in and solve problems. Of course, the LAUSD is such a morass anyway that it was ridiculous to hire somebody totally new to the system in the first place.
This idiocy is unfortunately very common, with companies willingly being sold a bill of goods from a software company without first determining what they want it to do!
Deloitte and many others have been called in to bail out this type of failed installation over and over again, and generally that bail-out fails too. Better to dump the whole program and start over, and much cheaper too! Management should know better than to be suckered into a slick sales pitch for software that’s well beyond their means to implement and comprehend.