Michigan sues HP after 'botched' $49m upgrade leaves US state in 1960s mainframe hell Michigan is suing HP after the state government grew tired of waiting for the tech biz to fulfill an IT contract signed a decade ago. Hewlett Packard had agreed to replace the US state's aging computer systems that power so much of the local government. The tech firm signed a $49m contract back in 2005 to replace Michigan's …
again. And again probably not. I doubt they have another $20M firing bonus for her, again.
HP is a company that did well at what its founders knew and could manage. Once the MBA suits started taking over its everyone for themselves.
Not reading the background information, I also have to wonder if the fine folks in the Michigan Agency of Bullocks and Computer Machines weren't at least partially complicit, or perhaps totally complicit in screwing the taxpayers for years without having anything to show for it. Unless you count bags of shredded documents evidence of hard work.
AH, Carly, she only managed to double profits by buying Compaq. And even then, profits should have theoretically tripled... How the hell do you merge two companies and manage to pull in $10 Billion less than the sum of what both companies made the previous year?
"I also have to wonder if the fine folks in the Michigan Agency of Bullocks and Computer Machines weren't at least partially complicit"
It takes epic levels of incompetence on all sides for this sort of Olympic level of screw up. However, given that there are multiple states all experiencing the same problem upgrading similar systems with HP though, I suspect the main culprit is HP.
Ah, yes. Carly. Mrs. Flip-flop (read her recent record on major issues if you don't believe me).
IMO, the only other candidate the Republicans could possibly field in an attempt to finally run the nation into the ground permanently is Trump.
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Carly *left* HP in 2005, the year this contract was signed.
Yes. She should still get some of the blame, because a CEO's effect on the organization doesn't disappear the moment she departs, and HP has consistently screwed this up since the project began. But subsequent CEOs, and more importantly a whole bunch of other people in the nice offices, should also share that blame.
Carly's influence must have been bloody disastrous if the company is still suffering the after effects of her rule now. Was she in the pay of the Chinese, deliberately setting out to wreck the business?
To still have fallout ten years after leaving is one heck of a record. The fact the company is still in business indicates that historically it must have been overcharging horribly to generate enough cash to survive ten years of decline. She wrecked that cash stream.
And this woman wants to be President of the western world? The USA may as well declare bankruptcy now
"Could it be that HP is more interested in cutting staff than servicing customers?"
Could it be that HP simply outsourced the whole thing to the cheapest bidder in some place like India, who then split it up into packets and outsourced those to the cheapest sub-contractors they could find, etc.? I think that for many big companies "servicing customers" these days simply refers to having your sales staff spin them a story about how your outsource contractors are "95% done!" when they've actually walked off the job a while ago because they got fed up with being screwed around.
"Surely there must be a channel company out there that could do better."
It would be pretty hard to do worse.
Yep yep - that little shop that almost killed my ass with the Nicotine Dell was flailing around, trying to survive and got some of that HP outsourcing - HP's outsourcing is outsourced, then outsourced from whoever those guys were, then came to us - where we didn't make enough for it to be worth it.
There are multiple levels of outsourcing in HP contracts, pie get's smaller each time until it's no longer worth it to the local IT company. That's why they fail.
Looks good enough on paper, but reality? Not so much.
If the current systems date back from the 1960's, they'll be proper mainframes, not VAX (and certainly not Alpha) minis, so SIMH won't cut it. Has someone written an IBM 1170 emulator for the RasPi already?
A PC is a system you can forget a tool in.
A minicomputer is a system you can forget a toolchest in.
A mainframe is a system you can forget a service technician in.
Looking around at some of their purchase orders, it would seem they have Unisys mainframes running COBOL applications supported by a proprietary ISAM-type database engine, as well as more modern applications written in PowerBuilder with Sybase underpinnings.
Part of the problem they appear to have is the fundamental conceptual mismatch between ISAM and modern relational data stores makes it very hard to migrate the data without significantly rewriting the applications that currently process it. It's not a matter of simply getting off the mainframe hardware, it's getting off DMS II that's the challenge if they're going to be able to move forward.
I don't know about Unisys, but IBM's had 50s mainframes in VMs since the 60s or 70s. That solves the hardware problem but you still have to do manual chores, e.g. allocating disk space by the cylinder. Then you wrap 5 layers of VM in all the layers of modern web crap, bridged by a screen scraper type thing running at 19200 baud.
My state (Massachusetts) still had such things a few years ago, probably still does... Unemployment being a particularly frustrating one for anyone running a business.
Yeah, good luck with that.
It was hard enough teaching COBOL to upcoming young snots 25-30 years ago. I should know, I was one of those young snots back then ! If it's "legacy", they either won't want to know, or they'll be too afraid to mention it on their CV's because they won't want to make a career out of technology that's heading out the door.
I have a lot of experience with DEC kit and old brand-name Unix systems, so I tended to get dragged into projects that were migrating from such systems. (Maybe I need some new business cards - "Systems Executioner" or "The Decommissioner"...?)
I'm not sure. Anything dealing with Michigan makes me think this started under EDS (now HP Enterprise Services) but the project itself is a mainframe upgrade. That sounds like something HP's server and technical services guys might do.
Either way, there are people that simply are not doing their damn job. I'm betting that is the case on both sides of this matter. Both HP and Michigan.
If they did say that, then they probably have a good case.
Govt system replacement contracts tend to suffer from enormous cases of shifting goalposts.
It's almost never a case of "Port this to modern systems first" and almost always "while we're doing this, let's redesign it in a way that it won't work (which the contractors love and never point out) and then pay lots of extra charges to resolve it"
Better to replace with new than try and port very old no matter how well it works. Things have moved on in the last 50 years.
When I worked at EDS the porting projects invariably failed, the replace with new and migrate the data were normally were successful.
But they did make the classic EDS outsourced mistake on one project. Letting go the coders who were keeping the old system going by patching the code. PL/I can be an unforgiving mistress. They had to rehire 2 of them at great cost as contractors. Nice guys, but one looked like a 1960's OU lecturer and the other a badly aged member of a 1970's glam rock group, who still thought flares were cool.
Replace it with something new? You mean one of those new computing languages that will be replaced by another one in ten years by someone who knows enough about 10% of computing theory to think their new language will be better and proceeds to fall at every hurdle every other language fell at.
The question that should be asked is: Can we somehow use the old code in a way that we can make it run as fast as we need to and interact with it in a reasonable manner. Something that is 50 years old will be largely debugged and can probably be set running on a modern installation without too much effort.
You may have worked with EDS porting projects and had problems - that would be EDS I would imagine.
"Nice guys, but one looked like a 1960's OU lecturer and the other a badly aged member of a 1970's glam rock group, who still thought flares were cool."
Does that matter when they get to charge as much as they like? They could turn up in full Pennywise outfit and noone would have the gumption to tell them to take it off.
A par-for-the-course clusterfuck as delivered by HP Services. You remember their motto right : "at HP Professional services... we're not satisfied, until you're not satisfied".
I don't doubt that there may have been changes and the like on the customer side - but I doubt that would have continued far beyond formal contractual renegotiations; especially if HP agreed to what one assumes would be fairly robust accountability, penalty and contract variation clauses.
However, this as reported does sound EXACTLY the way HP operate, and of my recent experience of (unfortunately) working near to them on other large contracts. Too many managers who have no idea how to do detailed technical project or programme management; or to talk technically to the ream of outsourced suppliers and sub-contractors that HP use. They can't even do standard/modern stuff well, so god knows what their approach was to really old legacy and mainframe stuff which really requires the upfront legwork and due-dilligence.
Finally in my experience - I've yet to come across an HP consultant / programme or project / technical delivery manager that can do the detailed technical planning and delivery control required to an even moderate level.
Shocking. But unsurprising.
@Kubla Cant - "I should have thought that Michigan's requirements are pretty much the same as the other 49 states"
Who are also in a dispute with HP over similar mainframe replacements issues, as mentioned near the bottom of the story.
"Hasn't this problem been solved already?"
Not by HP, it would appear.
The following make for interesting reading:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/former-michigan-governor-john-engler-named-president-of-eds-state-and-local-government-business-73915312.html
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=169581
http://www.scribd.com/doc/281204019/State-Audit-Report
Thanks for those.
For anyone reading this from somewhere where scribd is blocked, the report is available from the Auditor General's website:
http://audgen.michigan.gov/finalpdfs/11_12/r231059011.pdf
I haven't checked if the two versions are the same.
It's not a pretty picture.
I quite like the bit in 2011 where the customer asked the supplier for a project plan.
"Part of that contract stated that if the contract was terminated then HP would still provide technical support for the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) in the interim period. "
So a contract stated that HP should provide technical support, but Michigan terminated that contract, and expects HP to honour that contract... how does that work?
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