I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Hmmmm. That’s really interesting. That was my reaction to reading two great stories by the Albuquerque Journal’s Colleen Heild on Sunday. If you want to check them out, click here and here.
Colleen’s stories are the latest to track how the state’s no longer new all-in-one purchasing and human resources computer system, SHARE, is still causing problems for the state’s Department of Transportation.
This is not a shock, of course. The DOT has endured problems for more than three years. But I thought the state had figured out how to remedy the problems the feds identified back in 2007. I wrote a story in November 2007 when I was still a reporter at the Journal about the Federal Highway Administration threatening to yank federal dollars from New Mexico if something wasn’t done to correct the faulty system.
Here’s an excerpt from that story for people who don’t subscribe to the Journal:
The Oct. 24 report says the suspension of federal reimbursements could occur as early as this month unless the state’s so-called SHARE system starts accurately tracking payroll costs and capital assets, such as land or buildings related to projects eligible for federal aid.
The report was issued after a federal audit on SHARE conducted this summer.
The federal government reimburses the state each year for expenses of highway and other transportation projects.
Transportation officials told me after that story ran that they were on the case and would patch things up, that they had formulated a plan that would satisfy the feds.
I guess the plan didn’t work as well as they had hoped.
Of course the DOT can’t be blamed for everything. The SHARE system was a nightmare back in 2006, when it first went online to replace more than 70 disparate state payroll, purchasing and human resources computer systems. The thinking was that it would be more efficient to have one system instead of dozens of different ones that didn’t communicate. But from the start SHARE produced problems. State workers, for one, ran into all kinds of trouble, as did state contractors and jurors at the courts. Many of those early problems faded, however, with more spending to repair a faulty system.
But the state Department of Transportation continued to have problems. Of course the state had signals prior to SHARE going online that the DOT might be plagued with problems.
Here’s another excerpt from that November 2007 story I wrote when I was at the Journal:
Concerns about the state transportation agency’s conversion to SHARE on July 1, 2006, were well documented. Prior to the conversion, an analysis done by Gartner Consulting said that while most New Mexico agencies were ready, the Department of Transportation agency was not.
[A DOT spokesman] said the state transportation agency “made a conscious decision to participate in SHARE” despite the warnings.
So the question remains why did the DOT go ahead with SHARE when it knew that there might be major headaches? I never really got a satisfactory answer from DOT on that score.
