Fix the Problem - Not the Blame

Last Thursday the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Attorney General’s office has lost 50 percent of the Tyler (Texas) Medicare Fraud case files.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has even become involved when he suspended the transfer of state records to an IBM data management program on Tuesday, saying serious glitches in Texas’ privatized computer system had put state agencies in danger.

There is an amazing and lengthy blog discussion about fault and blame at http://tinyurl.com/5gahdw. Blog writers blame the state, IBM and other vendors who are part of the Team for Texas, which is an $863 million, seven-year IT outsourcing contract.

Here’s out take. This was not a failure of technology. There is nothing difficult about making backup of the data in question – even if the servers are old and even if the platform is UNIX.

What is difficult is management. 27 state agencies are in the midst of transition to outsourced IT services. The organizations involved include the 27 agencies, IBM, Unisys, Xerox, Pitney-Bowes, Dell, and others.

Proper backup requires proper monitoring. Why? Because systems change. New applications get installed. Old applications get upgraded. Users change. User rights change. Storage capacity gets consumed. Connectivity demand grows and capacity gets strained.

It is easy to see how in a project this large someone could have failed to notice a problem. But that solves nothing. In our view, backup is a specialized service and a better approach is to utilize a provider who has built its business around that specialization. Would you really want a pediatrician to prescribe contact lenses for thousands of children?