The government of the state that is home to Silicon Valley and is widely considered the global leader in innovative technology continues to be plagued by problems with computers.

On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles reported things were close to normal after a chaotic week of mass computer failures, with just three DMV offices still offline. At one point earlier in the week, more than 120 of the the DMV’s 188 offices statewide were unable to handle such basic tasks as processing requests for new licenses or vehicle registrations.

Both the DMV’s main computer and its primary backup computer suffered what officials called “meltdowns.” In post mortems on the problem, experts outside state government expressed disbelief that both the main and backup computer were directly connected and housed in the same room, making both susceptible to the same risks from overheating, hacking and other problems.

“If their definition of disaster recovery is having primary and backup systems in the same hardware chassis, that’s grotesque,” one expert told The Los Angeles Times.

IT problems with veterans, CalPERS, UC and more

But to followers of the state government, the DMV’s information technology headaches were only the latest in a long line of embarrassing, basic problems.

In June, a report from the state auditor’s office said the California Department of Veterans Affairs had wasted $28 million on an erratic computer system that was supposed to process services and pay bills for care provided to state veterans.

In 2015, the Sacramento Bee reported that attempts to upgrade the state’s payroll and court system computers had been shut down with nothing to show for $850 million in spending. Similar attempts to upgrade payroll computers of the University of California’s campuses and hospitals were reported to be $50 million over budget and two years behind schedule.

In 2013, unemployment benefits for 150,000 residents went unpaid over the Labor Day weekend because of problems with new computers used by the state’s Employment Development Department.

In 2012, the California Public Employees’ Retirement system was besieged by complaints from state retirees whose health insurance policies weren’t being renewed because of problems with CalPERS’ new $514 million computer system.

In 2009, state Controller John Chiang said he was unable to comply with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s order to furlough state workers and reduce their pay during a budget crisis because the state’s computers were based on a programming language from the 1950s — COBOL — and couldn’t readily be reprogrammed.

Chiang faced charges from Republicans that he was just trying to insulate government union workers from the pain of the budget crisis. But John Thomas Flynn, hired by Gov. Pete Wilson as the state’s first chief information officer, said in a 2009 interview with me that he was inclined to believe Chiang.

Candid self-assessment is not the norm

Flynn has described California government’s computer failures as being the direct result of a culture in which no one is punished when bad things happen and candid self-assessment is rate.

Sacramento-based computer consultant Alex Castro offered a similar observation last year to Bee State Worker columnist Jon Ortiz. He said when an organizational cultures refuse to acknowledge their shortcomings, “they run into brick walls: bad leadership, bad tech people, lack of vision, overestimation of (in-house) skill sets.”

Now an effort is being launched to see whether “Big Data” might be able to reduce California’s often-awful urban gridlock. Fortune magazine has the details:

Los Angeles’ snarled, rage-inducing roads have been infamous for decades. And now, thanks to a tech industry-fueled population explosion, San Francisco is right behind L.A. in the title race for Worst Traffic in America.

 

AT&T, UC Berkeley and California’s state transportation authority are testing a new way to get a grip on the situation — by collecting and analyzing drivers’ cellphone location data. The study leads insist that users’ privacy is protected, and the information could revolutionize how we plan and manage highways and transit.

 

“The idea of using cellular data for mobility is not very new,” admits Alexei Pozdnukhov, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Smart Cities program. “What is new … is that our approach is much more detailed modeling. We can simulate very detailed scenarios, and answer questions.”

L.A. and Bay Area the initial focus

Traffic can be horrible in other parts of the state — San Diego and Sacramento freeways are often brutally clogged in the morning and evening rush hours, and the 75-mile section of the Interstate 15 corridor from Lake Elsinore to Hesperia is a common target of Sigalerts during daylight hours because of heavy commercial traffic. But the initial focus will be on the biggest population centers:

The new California projects — Connected Corridors in Los Angeles, and SmartBay in San Francisco — are something like Google Maps on steroids. They compile region-wide cell data into big portraits, not just of where traffic is most congested, but of overall daily patterns.

 

“[It shows] where people … work, where they go for shopping, where they go for leisure, and how they choose to get there,” says Pozdnukhov. Dr. Compin says that’s “the holy grail” of transit planning.

 

The data will help planners develop detailed responses to congestion events — Compin says there are a stunning 5,000 to 6,000 events per year on the I-210 corridor, making up about 50 percent of traffic delays. By working closely with local authorities and public transit providers, Caltrans hopes to make better decisions about how to re-route traffic onto parallel corridors and local roads, and communicate changes to commuters more smoothly. The San Francisco pilot is centered on Interstate 80, and among other things, says Pozdnukhov, hopes to determine the potential impact of increased development on the Treasure Island neighborhood the highway passes through.

Research can be basis of driverless-car grid

The effort depicted by the Fortune article could end up being as tantamount to a crucial first step toward establishing a grid for driverless cars. Such a grid could steer traffic in certain directions based on algorithms anticipating optimal vehicle flow. The theory is this could be done in a way that would dramatically reduce gridlock.

Studies also emphasize how an orderly computer-run traffic grid of autonomous cars could sharply reduce pollution, especially if the cars were hybrids or otherwise didn’t have internal combustion engines.

Tens of thousands of state employees have exceeded the official limit of 80 banked vacation days, leaving the state on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.

What are the names of the workers at the top of the list? The State Controller’s Office, which collects the information and generally prides itself on transparency, wouldn’t say.

Rick Chivaro, the controller’s top lawyer, said he considered the information confidential, even though his office routinely discloses salaries of state workers by name.

It turns out that one of the two top vacation troves belongs to Chivaro himself. By June of last year, he had saved up 498 days of vacation, more than six times the limit. If he retired with that much time off, Chivaro could cash out $317,000 ­­– nearly two years of pay.

The Center for Investigative Reporting was able to identify a few of the state’s biggest vacation misers by their pay rates and job titles, information provided by Chivaro in response to a public records request. …

Two and a half years ago, the controller’s office criticized the California Lottery Commission for failing to enforce the state vacation cap among its employees. Yet the controller’s office employs 48 individuals with at least twice the maximum vacation days, the data shows. Seven of them, including its chief of human resources, had more vacation on the books than anyone at the Lottery Commission.

Who is overseeing the overseers?

As Cal Watchdog has pointed out repeatedly, a fundamental problem in trying to rein in the cost of government pensions and perks is that the officials who should be cracking down on the abuses have a financial incentive to look the other way or to downplay problems. The CIR report touched on this angle:

“Wow. That’s just wrong,” said Joe Nation, professor of the practice of public policy at Stanford University. “Anyone on the inside or the outside (of government) knows that that’s wrong.”

Nation, a former state lawmaker and municipal water board president, said it’s especially inappropriate for senior managers in salaried positions to “be able to take advantage of and abuse rules like this.”

What would a more reasonable policy look like? The CIR offers some larger context, than points to another big state:

Workers across the country make do with a finite amount of vacation. Many companies, and some states, have use-it-or-lose-it policies that keep employees from carrying over endless amounts of vacation.

In New York, for example, state workers can’t roll over more than 40 days and get paid out for up to 30 days if they quit or retire. At the stingy end of the spectrum, many employers don’t let workers save any unused time off at all, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.

As for unlimited stockpiling of vacation, “I’ve never seen it in the private sector,” said Bruce Elliott, manager of compensation and benefits for the Virginia-based organization. “It’s crazy to do that if you don’t expect a big expense.”