If you live in Indiana, pray that you don't need to file for unemployment.
I know there are at least one or two people who come to my website to see what Governor Daniels and his cronies are up to in the Indiana state government. Given that, I feel that it's my duty to discuss an issue which has made the news in Indiana recently regarding our unemployment system (which my agency deals with). The Indianapolis Star is reporting today that "reorganization" is to blame for the increase in turnaround time that some citizens are seeing for the issuance of their unemployment checks (in some cases taking twice as long as before). The article cites Commissioner Ron Stiver as saying that consolidation of processing to Indianapolis caused the delays, but will save $1.7 million a year. He is also cited as claiming that the delays should be resolved by the end of the year.
Commissioner Stiver is full of shit. Do you want to know what actually happened? I'll tell you, because by a cruel twist of fate I've found myself on the inside of this blind and lumbering beast the citizens of Indiana call their government. I'm also about to get a pink slip from my new Republican Overlords in the next few months, so take what I say with that in mind (I'm not implying that I'll be untruthfully biased, but I may throw in a few choice invectives).
Until recently, each local branch of DWD (~30 in total) had at least one staff person called a "Claims Deputy." This person's responsibility was to handle escalated unemployment claims issues - they were the next line of answerability beyond your front-line claims taker. Some of the larger offices had more than one of these positions. All told, the agency employed 120 claims deputies. A couple of months ago, Commissioner Stiver announced that all of these positions would be moving from their respective local offices to the administrative office in Indianapolis. This consolidation was supposed to save the agency the fabled $1.7 million. He claimed that it was a hard decision, but that he wasn't someone who shied away from tough calls when they would save money and help the agency meet its goals.
79 of the claims deputies resigned their positions rather than relocating to Indianapolis, leaving the agency with fewer than 50 individuals to handle escalated unemployment claims. To further the problem, these claims deputies are trying to do their jobs via telephone instead of face-to-face with the claimants they're trying to help. In addition, in most local offices the claims deputies performed a lot more duties than what their job descriptions entailed. In some offices, the lead claim deputy functioned as a defacto back-up for the office manager. When I lead new workstation deployments as part of the Customer Support team in 2003-2004, this lead deputy was the person we coordinated our efforts with in a number of offices. Needless to say, pulling these people from the field offices has placed a great burden on the offices themselves than is implied by what Stiver believes is a simple act of consolidation.
Due to all of these factors, the time it takes between the filing of an unemployment claim to the receipt of the first unemployment check has risen from an average of three weeks to an average of six weeks. Stiver claims that this issue will be resolved by or before the end of 2005. I'd love to know what data he's looking at to make him believe that. If anything, the unemployment insurance backlog in Indiana (which has grown by 3,000 cases in the the last month alone) will continue to grow. Some people within the agency believe that the backlog will as much as double in size by December.
Good going, guys.
So we're saving $1.7 million, but we've spent how much on contract labor?
The use of contract labor as a substitute for training internal staff is no new beast to DWD. It seems to be standard practice to hire consultants to handle major IT projects instead of investing in permanent staff. Apparently DWD, the agency which touts such programs as the "Lifelong Learning Institute," doesn't believe that the policy of continuing education applies to its own staff.
However, this practice has reached a fever pitch under the leadership of Mitch Daniels and his envoy to DWD, Commissioner Ronald Stiver. As demands are placed upon our agency's IT resources to perform a number of miraculous feats (including absolutely unrealistic timetables for projects such as a Groupwise to Exchange and Netware to Windows migrations), DWD's internal IT staff are being marginalized. DWD's CIO, Roy Templeton, has continued to authorize the hiring of consultants (many from Haverstick, see my entry on August 3rd) to perform these functions. Resident staff are relegated to supporting legacy infrastructure and kept out of the loop on emerging technologies and policies at almost every turn. Ask me how many Microsoft projects I've been brought in on in the last three months. Go on, ask me. The answer is zero. DWD's staff need to replace their Novell-centric skillsets with Microsoft-centric ones in order to secure jobs for themselves at IOT when our internal operations are consolidated with theirs early next year. Many of us, including myself, had hoped the ramp-up process and move from Netware to Windows would provide us an opportunity to hone those skills. Instead we're being left out in the cold.
Meanwhile, we've hired six consultants for a period of six months each for a total of $600,000 in contract labor. That $1.7 million doesn't seem so impressive now, does it?
Oh, and if you're blind or deaf, screw you too.
One last tidbit of work angst and then I'm finished for today, I promise.
It has been brought to my attention that the DWD's website (www.in.gov/dwd) does not fully comply with Section 508 of the Section 508 standards for accessibility, which we are required by law to do according to the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. Not one to trust the rumor mill, I ran the site through WebXact, a testing service that tests for W3C accessibility guidelines (which are very similar to 508 standards). Go on, try it yourself. Great job, guys.
Incindentally, many other Indiana state government websites fail this test as well, including IOT's. I can't say for sure if they're subject to Section 508 or not, though.
And no, I wasn't being sarcastic.
-Sam
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