Today's new integrated systems involve many political camps, including cities, counties and, of course, special-interest groups. Failure to include these stakeholders can have disastrous consequences, as California found out when its plans for statewide welfare and child-support systems never had the full support from the state's 52 counties. As a result, both multi-million dollar projects were either partially or wholly scrapped. If lack of project-management skills, discipline and training wasn't enough of a problem, states also must contend with outdated procurement systems and ongoing difficulties with software design and development. Fortunately, progress has been made to mitigate this problem.
Some states appear to be making progress.
Marple noted that the procurement problem facing system development was not consistent among the states he visited. Still troubling for IT departments is the vagaries of software development. In the early years, nearly all software programs were custom written for the special needs of government. Software code development was a dark art, practiced by software artisans who hand-crafted lines of code from raw programming languages. Often, they used techniques that couldn't be measured or repeated consistently.