Real ID isn’t the only problem with DMV
Director says it will take three years to modernize department’s technology
As California’s Department of Motor Vehicles takes heat for a 46 percent rise in customer wait times over the past year, DMV officials are attributing the delays largely to the number of customers flocking to local offices to get their Real IDs.
It’s true that lines are longer because more people are going to offices for the new licenses, which the federal government is requiring starting in 2020 for people who want to board a flight without a passport.
But an underlying cause of the DMV’s misery this year is a familiar one in California state government: a creaky, decades-old computer system the department agrees is “a 40-yearold dinosaur.”
The department also said it has had dozens of technology outages in the past 20 months that have disabled operations, sometimes for hours at a
time. At a hearing last week, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said it would take three years to modernize that technology and bring the systems into the 21st century.
“Our system is an old, antiquated system,” she said. “We are working to
modernize that and are working on that project right now.”
In the meantime, the DMV’s approach has been to ask lawmakers for more money to hire additional workers. On the day the Legislature de-
nied Republicans’ call to audit the agency, it also approved $16.6 million to hire 230 more DMV employees.
A separate request for $26 million to hire an additional 400 employees remains under consideration.
A DMV supervisor who testified at a legislative hearing this month said the problems run deeper than staffing.
“They’re doing all this mass hiring, but it’s not fixing the problem,” said Cullen Grant, a 13-year DMV employee now managing a
Los Angeles field office.
DMV Automation, the department’s internal database management system, launched in the 1980s, and employees still use an outdated system for entering customer information. The DMV relies heavily on a series of smaller systems as a workaround for employees to enter information and complete requests.
According to Grant, employees waste time trying to navigate through the categories.
“You have all these subsystems that are not integrated into the main system, which is causing transaction and processing times to go up,” Grant
said. “What’s going on is the department has been misleading or overexaggerating that Real ID has been the cause of it.”
Though the DMV is working to update that system, Grant said, the department has a poor track record of implementing new technology. One example is in the queuing system, which the DMV uses to determine a customer’s place in line.
Under a previous program called Orchestra, employees could give customers a ticket with a single click of a button. A 2-inch-by-2-inch sheet of paper was printed immediately. But late last year, the DMV adopted a new
Customer Flow Management System (CFS), which requires employees to collect customers’ personal information so that the system can generate a unique number — their initials and the last four digits of their phone number.
Employees then have to write that number on a piece of paper because CFS is unable to go ticketless and send text messages to customers.
“Going from one button to get somebody checked in to almost taking two, three minutes to check a customer in, it makes no sense,” Grant said.
The California Department of Technology considers
the queuing system to be highly critical and estimates the total project cost at nearly $18 million. Though the system “is expected to provide enhanced report capabilities that will help the DMV manage and reduce customer wait times,” it is behind schedule and continues to have lingering quality issues that “remain to be fully addressed.”
DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez acknowledged the past issues with the system and said the department is implementing a “staggered rollout” to ensure it will work properly. Gonzalez urges customers to check the DMV website
and use office kiosks to help reduce wait times.
“Obviously, we saw issues when we first rolled out CFS,” she said. “It caused a lot of confusion with people. We did switch back to a manual process until we could get the system going.”
The DMV said at last week’s hearing that it is piloting a text messaging system, but it did not discuss its history of technical issues. The department repeatedly declined to answer questions from Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, during a budget hearing about the scope of the problems it sees with system outages.