A Million More Reasons to Dump Miszewski

What's a million dollars when you're spending other people's money?
That appears to be the attitude of the Doyle Administration as failed IT projects dig taxpayers deeper and deeper into debt.

In April the Joint Legislative Audit Committee called for a review of several, multi-million dollar IT projects that are behind schedule and way over budget. Included in the review is the state server consolidation project led by employees of the consulting firm, Crowe Chizek. The firm walked off the job last week due to a contract dispute with DOA management.

Crowe Chizek officials say they’ve met all the project milestones to date, but DOA is withholding the final payment of $1.8 million for services it says the firm has not delivered.

Crowe officials maintain all of the milestones have been met and were signed off on by Matt Miszewski, the state's chief information officer. They blame state officials for delaying the work by failing to conduct certain tasks, hire and train key personnel and make the physical improvements needed to consolidate the servers.

"All of the milestones have been completed," said company spokeswoman Amanda Stevenson, adding that "many times a change in leadership will require additional effort and education on a project, its history and decisions previously made."

Bablitch, who took over from former Administration Secretary Marc Marotta in October, is "convinced Matt Miszewski did not provide any additional authority" for Crowe to take on extra work, Dilweg said.

Dilweg said state employees will take over management of the server consolidation project, and the longer Crowe Chizek stays off the job, the less they will be needed to complete the work in the future.

Now we learn that DOA will pay another vendor to take over the botched email migration project which has already resulted in a loss of $2.6 million dollars. A cost analysis shows that state employees could perform the work for a million dollars less than the contractor, but DOA says its employees don’t have the expertise needed to get the job done.

I don’t know server consolidation from email migration, so I can’t say whether DOA is right to spend the extra million to hire the consultants or not. The trouble is, with so many missed deadlines and cost overruns, Wisconsin’s Chief Information Officer, Matt Miszewski no longer has the credibility to make the call. Miszewski has spent his career at DOA flitting all over the country boasting about himself and Doyle’s ACE initiative, while things back home are falling apart.

Conventional wisdom is that Miszewski will not be asked to resign his position before the election, as this would amount to a tacit admission of the Administration’s ineptitude managing information technology. Well folks, the cat’s already out of the bag, and keeping him around will only continue to erode public confidence and the morale of hardworking state employees.