By Chris Reed

The Sacramento Bee’s Jon Ortiz had a piece Thursday about the grotesque mess that is California state government that had lots of interesting details about the extent of the dysfunction:

“Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown christened an overhaul of the state’s personnel system, aiming to correct the wandering course of a government beset with arcane, conflicting rules that confound even the most experienced human resources managers.

“Now that overhaul faces a very public test with the state’s probe into ‘additional appointments.’

“Several agencies have cited the obscure 34-year-old policy as justification for giving salaried managers and supervisors secondary jobs that pay an hourly wage. The policy is so old that it exists only on paper. It’s confusing, imprecise and desperately needs updating.

“There are probably dozens — maybe hundreds — of similar personnel rules and regulations that departments — those that know about them, anyway — read and apply differently.”

Not in public employees’ interest to fix state’s mess

But Ortiz’s column, like so many other stories and analyses over the years, doesn’t acknowledge one reason why the chaos exists and has been tolerated. Indeed, he even asserts that it’s in everyone’s interest to fix the mess, because ….

” … an archaic, dysfunctional state government personnel system hurts everyone.

“‘Calcified personnel practices that were intended to measure “merit” discourage highly qualified people from applying for and landing state jobs, the independent, bipartisan Little Hoover Commission concluded eight years ago.”

Oh, what a load of hooey. An “archaic, dysfunctional state government” is one in which employee performance can’t be measured, employee efficiency can’t be improved and employee positions can’t be reduced.

Connect the dots. If the information-technology revolution had been allowed to transform the public sector as it has the private sector, we’d see government doing as much as it used to with far fewer workers. Instead, the IT revolution never made it to the public sector, including and especially in the state that’s home to Silicon Valley. Instead of doing more with less, we have chaos and overlap and confusion.

Government productivity gains could be ‘huge’

And, no, it’s not true that the public and private sectors are so different that the IT revolution couldn’t make a difference in government efficiency. Here’s what the respected McKinsey consulting group said nearly a decade ago: “the opportunity to improve government productivity is huge … [with] three classic management tools . . . organizational redesign, strategic procurement and operational redesign.”

More on the topic from a column I did last year to mark the 200th anniversary of the peak of the Luddite movement in England:

“The key to [government] redesign is to stop building off the presumption that we need to have workers gather in the same building to handle routine tasks, and to require that consumers of government services go to these buildings, too.

“I once had to go to the Poway DMV to get a copy of a vehicle registration that I had lost because it was the only local DMV that had an appointment slot available within two weeks. Why? Why? Why? For God’s sake, in an era in which you can design your next car and do a zillion other things on the Internet, why do you ever have to drive to a government office anywhere to fill out a permit or pick up a form?

“Where are the virtual offices? Where are the MBA consultants who come in and spot ineffeciences and outline changes that seem obvious in retrospect? Why don’t we see the IT revolution depopulate government bureaucracies the same way it wiped out travel agencies?

“Because of 21st-century Luddites who hide behind claims of defending the middle class. The reality is that we’re seeing what is in essence immense featherbedding across all levels of government.”

This is why California’s state government is dysfunctional and chaotic: Because if it were run rationally and like a competent large corporation, we probably could get by just fine with half the state workers we now have.

This is what’s at stake in the fight over making state government more functional. Jon Ortiz may not have figured it out, but you can bet the unions have. And if the lunatics running the state Public Employment Relation Board have their say, the Brown administration will end its reform push after having been told that reform is only OK if it’s been collectively bargained.

By Chris Reed

Friday’s news that state Controller John Chiang had fired the second contractor hired to upgrade the state government’s computer payroll system for incompetence and poor work — a few years after the first contractor was fired for the same reason — is an amazing commentary on the disconnect between the genius of California’s private sector and the stupidity of Sacramento.

This is where the information technology revolution began! And we have a payroll system built on punch-card computers from the 1970s? And after nearly a decade of trying to fix it, we’ve made no progress???

“This is the home of Silicon Valley; it’s so embarrassing,” said Debra Bowen.

But that wasn’t Bowen in her present role as California’s secretary of state. That was what she said in 1999, when she was a state senator commenting on another computer debacle.

In April 2012, I whined about a Sacramento Bee report which (my description) warned that “the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was having so many problems with its new $514 million computer system that some retirees are getting notices that their health insurance policies are being canceled because of CalPERS’ nonpayment of premiums.”

Computer debacles the Sacramento norm

As I detailed then, this was nothing new:

“In 1994, a state audit found the Department of Motor Vehicles wasted nearly $50 million on a computer ‘modernization’ project that would actually have yielded a slower computer system than the relic it was to replace.

“In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis canceled an $18 million state program to integrate computer systems tracking welfare and social services recipients because it offered no hope of progress – the fifth failed effort at the same task that decade. The state ended up paying fines of nearly $1 billion for delays in meeting a federal mandate to have a functional computerized system to track child support payments.

“In 2005, a Sacramento Bee report found that efforts to implement reforms of the state prison system were impossible to evaluate for their effectiveness because the state Department of Corrections – despite huge budget increases – had never set up a central computer database to track individual prisoners and employees as it was directed to do in 1992. This poor tracking led to more violence in overcrowded prisons and to arguably higher recidivism because of an inability to evaluate which prisoners would respond to programs meant to help them integrate back into public life.”

This next paragraph involves the project where Chiang fired the contractor Friday:

“In 2009, efforts to furlough state employees and reduce their pay were called impossible by experts in and out of state government because the state payroll system relied on decrepit computers using half-century-old programming language. The ’21st Century Project’ upgrade of the system – originally bid out to a contractor at $69 million – now seems likely to cost $500 million.

“In 2011, a state audit lambasted a planned statewide computer system meant to link courts in all 58 counties. The audit said the system could end up costing $1.9 billion – seven times the original $260 million estimate.”

Do you, yunno, see a pattern here?

I see this as part of a larger continuum in which California Democrats and much of the media who constantly and at times correctly rail against the private sector for corruption, cutting corners and being amoral completely absolve the public sector when seeing similar epic fiascos. Why? Do even Democrats believe the cheap jokes about “government work”? Apparently.

It’s 2013, and even after spending more than $250 million, California has a payroll system based on computer programs from the 1970s. The same California where computer geniuses have changed the world with their hardware and software breakthroughs since the 1970s.

Write your own punchline.