Boeing/State of Pennsylvania

The State of Pennsylvania decided to merge all three of its online technologies into one. From Univac terminals, state assistance offices could update the Univac database. From Lottery terminals, Lottery agents could communicate with the state lottery using their Bi-Sync protocol. From Dept of Transportation SDLC terminals, state license offices could communicate with their license databases in IBM mainframes. Wouldn't it be wonderful if state Welfare offices could check on the car and driver licenses in the IBM database? Wouldn't it be expensive? Wouldn't it be slow? Wouldn't it be too slow?  Well, yes, yes, yes, but it took 3 years and millions of dollars (original plus overruns) to prove that the Governor's pet project wasn't worth it. Or drag it out until he got out of office.

Boeing Computer Systems "won" the contract to allow the state employees on any terminal type to access the data on everyone else's database. A grand scheme to create political mayhem. Each dept was its own fiefdom. Let everyone in to it? Sure! NOT!

But first, Boeing contractors had to make it work. We told them the first month that the configuration was wrong, and  a redesign which would cost a couple million dollars more. Forget it. Use the current design, even if the response time would be slow. Slow? Three years later, at its best, response was 25 seconds instead of the current 5 seconds, all because of the million dollar bottleneck. Grounds for suing? But the contract requirements were signed off as "met" even though they weren't. So after 3 years we left and the Governor probably did too.