State officials complain about poor service even for routine functions
(7/19/2010)
A large backlog of work requests from its State of Texas customers unattended by IBM has put the technology service provider’s large contract with the state further in jeopardy. On Monday, the state’s House budget panel heard a testimony by Ed Swedberg, deputy executive director for the state’s Department of Information Resources, in which he reported that the company has failed to deliver even some of the most routine services, The Dallas Morning News reported.
The testimony follows issuance of a warning from state officials late last week that unless it fixes a number of issues with the ongoing state data center consolidation project in the next 30 days, IBM will lose the $863m contract to transfer IT infrastructure of more than 25 state agencies to two upgraded data centers, according to an American Statesman report.
“These are day-to-day requests, such as adding memory to a server, restoring a file or re-setting a password,” The Dallas Morning News quoted Swedberg as saying. “This is of course frustrating … and more importantly affects the agencies’ ability to serve citizens and other constituents.”
When approached by the news service, an IBM spokesman dismissed the testimony as “misguided accusations” by state officials.
The warning IBM received from the state last week included accusations of 19 contract breaches by the service provider in the data center consolidation project. “As of today, IBM has only completed a little over 10 percent of the total server consolidation,” Swedberg said. “We continue to rely on aging infrastructure of our critical systems and applications. This is clearly unacceptable.”
The company has already received more than half of the total payment for the project.
Trouble in the relationship between IBM and the State of Texas was first made public in November of last year, when the Secretary of State’s office decided to exclude the state’s election system from outsourcing to IBM. The reason cited was a server crash that resulted in 13 days of downtime of a filing system the agency maintained.
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