This is not what the state needed. After much criticism about the construction of the state’s new data center in Olympia, word comes that a power surge at the existing facility that recently took down many state government Web sites and email systems will cost taxpayers $500,000 in overtime, repairs and equipment, according to an AP report in The Olympian.
A contractor reportedly was working on a high-voltage power line that short-circuited, causing a shut down of the state’s data center for the first time in 20 years, according to the AP.
State-run data centers have been a sore subject in Olympia for months, with lawmaker Reuven Carlyle one of the biggest critics. In June, Carlyle wrote that his request for a $268 million audit of the Wheeler State Data Center — which has yet to open — was denied.
In a blog post, the state representative wrote that Moore’s Law has overwhelmed the government’s “ability to manage IT spending effectively.”
He continued:
“Moore’s Law points to the idea that technology gets dramatically smaller, cheaper and more efficient with each iteration. Olympia remains trapped in a hardware-centric, proprietary, closed world of massive IT spending instead of a modern, web-centric, low-cost, standards-based software environment. I don’t pretend to have every answer in the IT space as I’m not even an engineer, but I do know a little bit about managing big decisions in this fast-changing space.”
I asked Carlyle for a follow-up to those remarks in light of the recent outage, and here’s what he said:
“My concern on this issue is that the state hasn’t embraced the seriousness of business process reform and management; they continue to see failures such as this as an equipment or hardware problem when it is usually, of course, a people or business process challenge.
I do not want to see any new requests for funding out of this failure but rather a serious resolve to make it a teachable moment. Unfortunately, the reason we spend $1.9 billion a biennium on technology in our state is because we’re trapped in proprietary, hardware, silo-based thinking rather than an open, standards-based web centric world of reality.”
