[November 18, 2009] Former manager on POINTS doesn't endorse off-shoring Tweet HELENA, Nov 17, 2009 (Billings Gazette - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- A manager for one of Montana's most disastrous off-shored computer programs has some advice for decision-makers considering another state information technology contract that includes shipping work to foreign employees overseas: Don't do it. "The outsourcing is a bad idea," said David Clague, a retired software engineer who managed two parts of a failed Department of Revenue computer system known by its acronym as POINTS. POINTS, undertaken in Gov. Marc Racicot's second term, cost Montana an estimated $60 million in the software, which was abandoned in 2005, and in lost tax revenue. The system was supposed to integrate Montana's property and income tax programs into one, but it never worked correctly. Lawmakers decided to pull the plug on POINTS in 2005. Several pieces of POINTS were built in India by a company called Tata, which was hired as a subcontractor of the global firm, Unisys. Tata's employees were "very smart" and well-educated, Clague said. But their location in a country 12 time zones away, combined with a communication barrier among some of the workers, helped bring about the demise of POINTS. "Managing the quality was probably the biggest thing," Clague said. POINTS was to be built by merging pieces made in India with pieces built in Montana. Managers of the project here relied on Tata to test their part of the overall project to make sure it was working correctly. Writing a program to run something as complex as a state's entire tax collection system relies on strong communication, Clague said. That's where things broke down with Tata. Montana programmers would get Indian-written pieces of POINTS. If they found a problem, which is common in complex computer systems, getting it fixed -- or simply communicating the problem to the person who actually wrote the code -- took several cumbersome steps and usually several days. First, Clague said, Montana programmers would tell the Indian Tata managers stationed in Montana, called "leads." Although English is a common language, the Tata leads didn't always understand the nuance of what the Montana managers were trying to say. "And the leads would pass on what they thought was the change, and then we would go through the process again," Clague said. The changes "didn't always get expressed correctly, and the changes made in India would maybe be right, maybe be almost right." "If the development had been done here, probably the checking would have been a little more comprehensive," Clague added. Adding to the confusion was the time difference; most things a Montana manager might request here wouldn't get to the Indian programmer until the next business day. Clague said the whole process could be compared to a game of "Around the World." Every time a message was repeated, it got changed a little bit. Throw in a communication barrier and a 12-hour time delay, and making anything work in an efficient manner became almost impossible. Clague also questioned the assertion that Indian-written programmers are cheaper. He said that integrating Indian- and Montana-written code required much more time than rolling out a product made in one place. Testing, de-bugging and testing again took a great deal of time and drove up costs, Clague said. "Time is dollars," he said. To see more of the Billings Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.billingsgazette.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Billings Gazette, Mont. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]