So...how does this work again? You did say "ethics," right?
It has been announced that the Indiana Department of Workforce Development has selected Carmel-based Haverstick Consulting the contract for its multi-million dollar Unemployment Insurance Modernization project (UIM). The project's goals are to revise the way unemployment claims in Indiana are processed and streamline the way citizens interact with DWD using technology to bridge the gap. The current system is a combination of mainframe batch processing, a clumsy web-based system and kiosk-style workstations at offices scattered around the state where people can file for unemployment and look for new jobs simultaneously.
There's no denying that the system needs to be overhauled. If anything, this should have been done five years ago. My problem with this situation arises with how messy the entire process has been. Before you say "But Sam, it's government. Of course it's been messy," let me explain things a bit.
A year and a half ago, this same contract was awarded to a company called TCS, a multinational consulting firm. This company had done a similar modernization project for New Mexico's unemployment system and appeared to have the skills and experience we needed to complete the project to our satisfaction. Best of all, they came in significantly lower than the next several closest bids. Here's the kicker - TCS is based out of India. They employ predominantly Indian programmers and analysts and in addition to consulting work, they specialize in helping companies outsource their IT operations to offshore locations (read: India). Woops.
The administration at the time, headed by Governor Joe Kernan (who had recently taken over following the sudden death of Governor Frank O'Bannon), saw fit to award the contact anyway and hoped that TCS's controversial business model wouldn't cause any waves. They were wrong.
As TCS started flying personnel in from India, some of whom rented apartments, leased cars and made arrangements to bring their families over for the ~18-month project, the citizens of Indiana, passionate but woefully uninformed, began to lodge complaint after complaint with the Governor's office. They were outraged that a foreign consulting firm would be awarded such a lucrative contract when Indiana was home to many thousands of unemployed programmers.
Concerns about the free market aside, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the unemployed programmers in Indiana did not possess the necessary skills for the UIM project. Most of Indiana's out of work programmers were, at the time (and probably still are), retired mainframe jockeys. They either came from the days of FORTRAN and COBOL or, in the case of some of the younger ones, had obtained training in languages such as COBOL in order to benefit from the Y2K conversions happening all over the state during 1997-1999. They were simply unfit to take on the task we had in front of us, even if they had all worked for a single consulting firm that could have bid on the contact.
Just when it appeared that Kernan was going to weather the controversy and allow TCS to do their job, he suddenly decided to cancel the contract and pledged that the bidding rules would be modified to give Indiana firms a better shot at winning contracts. Suspiciously, he did this two days before he announced his intention to run for Governor (which he had said he had no interest in prior to O'Bannon's death). So TCS was cut loose, Indiana lost a good chunk of change for cancelling the contract and dozens of contractors were sent packing back to India. Yay.
Flash forward to last summer. My then-supervisor is reassigned to other duties and they bring in a consultant to manage our team. This consultant, a nice man by the name of Brian Somethingorother, just so happens to be from Haverstick. He's here for a couple of months, and then is told that they have to cancel his contract. Apparently Haverstick was bidding on the re-issued UIM contract and it would be a "conflict of interest" for him to remain in the employ of DWD.
Flash forward again to this spring. As we gear up to migrate from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange (and really begin gearing up for a general Novell > Microsoft migration to happen later in the year), several consultants are brought in to assist our understaffed Server Support personnel (that's me). The vast majority of these contractors are from...you guessed it, Haverstick Consulting.
So when I see the announcement today that Haverstick has won the contract, I'm a bit baffled.
It makes me wonder how much they donated to Mitch's campaign.
-Sam
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