Eric Eyre continued his investigative reporting of Comar, Inc. for the Charleston Gazette over the weekend.  Mr. Eyre’s latest discovery: the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine awarded Comar a $212,000 no-bid contract to send unsolicited emails to prospective students, a service that some companies supposedly offer for as little as $250 per month.  The school then paid Comar an additional $19,864 to improve its online reputation.  Why?  Apparently to try to bury a story about a $90,000 sexual harassment lawsuit settlement, which kept popping up in Google searches of the school’s name.  (Yes, I found the article through a Google search – and thus did not help WVSOM’s efforts to bury it.  Sorry, President Rafes.)

This reminds me of another technology procurement story a few weeks ago.  In that story, Phil Kabler revealed that the West Virginia Office of Technology was trying to issue a sole-source contract to 20/10 Consulting to provide consulting services for the state’s massive new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.  I had seen the sole-source documents earlier and thought it funny that anyone would assert with a straight face that only one vendor could possibly provide the requested services.

It wasn’t until Kabler’s column that I realized that 20/10 Consulting was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Steptoe and Johnson, a large local law firm, which made the claim all that much more absurd.  The Office of Technology’s sole-source effort ultimately was rejected, and it appears to have placed the human resources portion of the consulting services contract out for bid this week.

I do not know what it is about technology, but I have repeatedly watched state agencies and higher education institutions be taken to the cleaners by vendors selling the latest and greatest technological wonder.  Indeed the State spent at least $20 million in the late 1990s and early 2000s on ATM communications technology, which left the state with little to show for the effort besides a multi-million dollar billing mess that took years to clean up.  I’ve been told West Virginia University has spent more than that trying to make its Oracle financial system work.

I also can’t begin to estimate how many millions of dollars higher education and state government have spent on “glorified websites” (a term coined by Senator Helmick, as I recall).  If you call your website a “portal,” I’ve discovered, the going rate for website development triples, so everyone now has “portals.”

Imagine my amazement last month when I was able to create my own portal/glorified website without paying anyone the $2,500 I had budgeted for it.  I’ll be glad to build a comparable “portal” for someone else for a cool $7,500 ($2,500 x 3 for calling it a portal).

If the State successfully implements an effective ERP system with the $60 million in pocket change that the Legislature so kindly provided, I will be very surprised.