State keeps dealing with software boondoggles
Wolf, said at a Nov. 14 hearing on the bill. “There are similar concerns with all state contracts.”
But Mr. Wolf’s appointees worry that the new office could “duplicate” and “conflict with” current procurement rules, Curt Topper, Mr. Wolf’s Department of General Services chief, told Mr. Grove at the hearing before Rep. Daryl Metcalfe’s Government AffairsCommittee.
Sharon Minnich, who runs Mr. Wolf’s Office of Administration, said the governor has spent many months developing a “shared services” IT procurement improvement initiative, like those Michigan and other states have implemented.
Mr. Grove said he’s tired of watching procurement practices shift and shift again under successive governors’ appointees — Pennsylvania needsbetter systems for tracking where taxpayer IT spendinggoes. For example, he said: Departments rely on “staff augmentation” contracts to bring in short-term IT workers,sometimes foreign nationals from countries that train more engineers than the U.S. hasavailable.
“We think this saves us a lot on short-term employees,” Mr. Grove said. “But some have been with us now for 10 or 15 years. Some are for purposes so specific they only contract with Corrections, or with PennDOT.”
Labor suppliers rake off high margins for each hour worked, depending on a contract employee’s stated experience and training. IT contractors at state agencies should be subject to at least the same conflict-of-interest restrictions as state employees, Kailash Kalantri, president of Blue Bell-based Acclaim Systems, a state IT contractor that last year received the Governor’s Achievement Award, testified at the Nov 14 hearing.
Stricter contractor review would “avoid abuse of power” and “prevent conflicts of interest,” Mr. Kalantri added.
The proposed reform isn’t about cutting costs, Mr. Grove said. It’s more “about financial transparency, so we can better see what we’re buying. …” The idea is to fit together a steady stream of incremental, workable projects that update and improve state services as part of clear goals and long-term plans — instead of “these large $200 million projects that always fail.”