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Wilson:
Adam Wilson Blog

Adam Wilson expounds on Washington state government, workers and politics. Wilson began covering those issues for the Olympian in 2004. He can be reached at: awilson@theolympian.com.

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Family leave computer: even more risk

• Published August 18, 2008

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To say the Employment Security Department had a tough chore in setting up a $6.2-million computer inside of a year was an understatement. So what if there's a hiring freeze and they need more people?

Timeline of OMNI funding

•1999-2001: $8.3 million

•2001-05: $17.9 million

•2005-08: $24.1 million *

•Total: $50.3 million

* Amount authorized. $23.9 million spent

The Olympian

Rep. Ross Hunter expressed in great detail his concerns about the project last month, including calling the risk of failure “vastly more severe than we’re talking about here." Now it's facing the governor's hiring freeze, and the agency is looking for an exemption:

"We were in ramp-up phase; we had staff in place and needed to bring more staff on board. We've got a very carefully designed work plan, and it's one of those conversations we'll be having," (ESD spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison) said.

Some exemptions to the hiring freeze are being granted, and the computer project staff members might qualify, said Wolfgang Opitz, deputy director of the Office of Financial Management.

"You don't want to waste money on delay. You have to be mindful of that, and mindful of legislative directions, and timelines," he said. "Those are the kinds of things that go into … considering whether something that is exempt from the freeze or not."

Whole story here.

It's not all uncertainty in the whole of state computers, however. I caught up with the Department of Corrections and OMNI last week, and the $50-million system seems to be up and running smoothly.

Spoke to Community Corrections Officer Stephanie Ison about it (pictured above) and when I asked if there was anything the new system doesn't do that she wished it would, she said, "Manage my offenders, run my cases."

Interestingly, Ison said OMNI doesn't really do much more than the 20-year-old system it replaces; it just does it more efficiently. A case of subtracting bells and whistles rather than adding them.