Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.

As we come to the end of our little song and truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story, it’s probably a good idea to draw attention to the lessons that can be learned from this little parable.

• Verizon and its technology partners are not devils incarnate, but government and higher education need to scrutinize carefully any “deals” they may be offering.  ATM provides a great example of a “deal” that was too good to be true.
• The State should not let mega-contracts that Verizon almost certainly will win.  I daresay that one of my more observant readers might be able to identify one such state contract (hint: M-P-L-S) let a few years ago that is supposed to be the latest answer to all of our technology prayers.
• The State is going to make bad bets – like ATM and Oracle at WVU – from time to time.  If those bets are made based on careful study and analysis, they should be considered a cost of doing business.  If those bets are made primarily because a vendor lobbied heavily for them, the people responsible for those bad bets should be held accountable for them.
• Any big technology project like ATM should be staffed properly and by technology professionals, not by employees of Cabinet Secretaries’ offices.  You can’t manage a $1.5 million per year program like ATM without staff unless you want to waste more money than you save.
• Higher education and state government are very different in terms of their attitudes toward and regulation of technology.  Higher education is always going to push the technology envelope, while state government generally is going to muddle along.  This is one reason why higher education, not state government, should take the technology lead.
• Higher education is insulated from the vicissitudes of political changes (or at least it used to be).  The Office of Technology, headed by a gubernatorial appointee and other will-and-pleasure appointees, is not.  We should not put anything as important as technology exclusively under the control of a political organization.

When will we learn?  It certainly doesn’t look like it will be anytime soon.

Well, maybe next year.

Don’t you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you’d want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns.
Don’t bother, they’re here.

Although I learned a lot about higher education institutions and how they operate during my Flatwoods meeting with WVNET staff, my main purpose for meeting with them was to learn more about something they called “shared facilities.”

I learned pretty quickly that shared facilities were nothing more than circuits across which multiple organizations’ video, voice and data traveled.  As part of an agreement with the previous Chief Technology Officer to create WVSUN (West Virginia State Unified Network), WVNET had taken primary responsibility for managing them.  Most shared facility circuits, I learned, were a lot more expensive than institution circuits.  In part this was because they were bigger, but also because most crossed two of the State’s four LATAs and thus had to be purchased from long distance providers.  (See “A Baby Bell” for an explanation.)

After meeting with WVNET staff in Flatwoods, I quickly figured out we had three problems: one financial and two legal.

The financial problem:

After identifying all the “free circuits” Verizon had given away on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary of Education and Arts and the shared facility costs that had been shifted to her, even though we were missing hundreds of thousands of dollars in invoices, I realized we owed about $6.5 million on a three-year appropriation of $4.5 million, and that appropriation was supposed to be coming to an end.  So we convened a meeting of key stakeholders, including the people who had circuits they weren’t using.  We told them we would pay for everything we could, but looked to be significantly short of money.  We also told them we would talk to legislators about the situation.

Shortly thereafter, we met with key legislators and staff members and explained the situation.  Fortunately, the legislators promised to continue the appropriation until we could get our house in order, at which point the subsidy would slowly be phased out.  I have always appreciated those legislators and their staff members who trusted us to make things right.

The legal problems:

In addition to the rather large financial problem, we had two not-insignificant legal problems of the constitutional variety.

First, it is unconstitutional to use a later year appropriation to pay for an earlier year service.  (Otherwise, the constitutional requirement to operate under a balanced budget would be meaningless.)  So a continuing appropriation couldn’t solve all of our rather large financial problems.  Indeed the only way some of these telecommunications providers were going to get the money they were owed was to file a claim with the Court of Claims, obtain a judgment, and then have the Legislature make an appropriation, which easily could take two years.

Second, the Legislature had funded the WV2001 Project from lottery revenue, which constitutionally can be spent only on education, tourism and a few other things.  But these shared facilities circuits included other telecommunications traffic for which payment would be unconstitutional.  Interestingly, quite a few shared facilities invoices had been paid by the Department of Education and the Arts in violation of the West Virginia Constitution before I arrived there.  Did anything happen as a result of this Constitutional violation?  No!  As a good friend likes to say: Some laws catch on better than others.  I would add Constitutional provisions to his list.

Luckily, we were able to exploit our legal problems to address our financial problems.  We, for instance, offered AT&T a payment equal to the percentage of traffic that legally could be paid for from lottery funds if they would walk away from the remainder of their (quite valid) claim.

And that is a large part of the story of how WVNET staff and others saved the State of West Virginia more than $1 million, much of which it admittedly never should have incurred, but almost all of which it owed.  And that is why the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts escaped the telecommunications billing debacle largely unscathed….

Don’t you love farce?…  My fault I fear….

Just when I’d stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.

Newer, faster, better!  If there’s one difference between higher education and state government, it is that higher education wants the latest technology, while state government seems more content to use current systems, even if cumbersome or unwieldy.

Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t yet have a good practical use for Internet II; institutions want it because no right-thinking research faculty member would come to a school that didn’t have it.  Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t know what on earth to do with Blackboard WebCT Vista’s enterprise distance learning solution; just spend $750K for the license, and distance learning will take off like gangbusters.  Don’t worry if you don’t have a plan to use new technology that West Virginia University is using.  If West Virginia University needs it, so does Glenville State College and Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College.

What’s the only thing higher education loves better than technology?  Someone else to pay for it, of course.  So you can imagine the excitement in higher education Chief Technology Officers’ offices in the late 1990s when Verizon came calling with a too-good-to-be-true deal on telecommunications circuits that would be doing everything from supporting distance learning to handling back office data traffic to managing telephone systems to cooking students’ meals over the next few years.

The too-good-to-be-true part? Higher education and others could have all of this technology for free thanks to a little ole $1.5 million appropriation from the West Virginia Legislature in the West Virginia Department of Education and Arts’ budget.  Every school from West Virginia University to Shepherd College (now University) to West Virginia Northern Community College got hooked up faster than Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire on double coupon day at the local BALCO store.

Surely students benefited from these expenditures, didn’t they?  Well, not at some institutions.  You’ve heard of the “Road to Nowhere.”  At several of our higher education institutions, we had “Circuits to Nowhere.”  Shepherd College, for example, acquired two circuits, to the tune of $600 per circuit per month, over which there was no telecommunications traffic for several years.  And West Virginia Northern Community College was so enamored by these “free circuits” that they didn’t “buy” the cheap kind that Shepherd was buying.  No, they wanted the top-of-the-line DS-3 circuits (cost: $3,800 per month), and they wanted one for each of their three campuses (cost: $11,400 per month/ $136,800 per year).  Did West Virginia Northern need these expensive circuits?  Let just say they dropped them like laundered nickels from a casino slot machine as soon as they learned they had to pay for them.

How did I discover these things?  I certainly didn’t learn about them from Verizon, which must have known there was little or no telecommunications traffic crossing some of these “free circuits.”  I certainly didn’t learn about them from IS&C, which couldn’t even find the bills, much less the circuits.  No, I learned them from two WVNET employees who drove to Flatwoods (ironically WVNET’s future home?) one day to educate me about shared facilities.

Operating in higher education, WVNET has always had to adapt more quickly and be more aware of technological changes than its state government counterpart.  WVNET was the first with mainframe, the first with internet, and its staff were the first to tell me what really was occurring with the WV2001 Project….

Making my entrance again with my usual flair…. Sure of my lines….  No one is there….

Isn’t it bliss?
Don’t you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can’t move.
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.

When I came to the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts as Chief of Staff in 2001, I found a large stack of telecommunications invoices, a Cabinet Secretary who wisely was refusing to pay them, and a staff who stared blankly at me when I asked them any question about the WV2001 Project or its invoices.

The invoices were from both long-distance telecommunications vendors and the West Virginia Information Services and Communications Division, the Office of Technology’s precursor.  It didn’t take me very long to figure out that I didn’t have all of the bills and, even more importantly, that I didn’t have a clue whether we should pay for them.  It also didn’t take me long to figure out that Verizon and others were busy complaining to every politician who would listen that they weren’t being paid by their biggest customer – the State of West Virginia.

So I asked my blankly-staring staff (good people in over their heads) who could help us figure out the WV2001 project, given that the person in charge of it had made an abrupt exit from IS&C shortly before I started work for the Cabinet Secretary.  At the meeting they arranged for me, I met the state’s technology leaders, many of whom I came to respect a great deal: Dr. Jan Fox, Marshall University’s CIO on loan to the Wise Administration; Brenda Williams, director of educational technology for the West Virginia Department of Education; Billy Jack Gregg, Consumer Advocate for the West Virginia Public Service Commission (who hadn’t been invited by us, but came anyway and shook his head back and forth and laughed throughout the entire meeting, which, I must say, was very disconcerting for a brand new Chief of Staff); and Henry Blosser, WVNET’s director.

During that meeting, I learned that these weren’t run-of-the-mill telephone bills about which we were talking, but rather bills for something called telecommunications circuits that could carry video, audio, and data.  This is not what you would have thought from reading the Charleston Newspapers, which were reporting that the State wasn’t paying its telephone bills (which also was true).  Additionally, I learned that our bills from long-distance carriers were for something called shared facilities, circuits over which multiple organizations’ video, audio, and data traveled, and most of my IS&C bills were from Verizon for circuits to specific organizations.

What I didn’t learn until much later was that many of the shared facilities bills had been shifted from IS&C to the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts shortly before Governor Wise took office, not because the Department had made a commitment to pay them, but rather because IS&C had failed to rebill them by the end of the state fiscal year, and agencies with expiring funds (supposedly) could not pay for them.  (WV2001 project funds did not expire.)  Older and wiser, I now know that most people who claimed they couldn’t pay these bills could have paid (and later did pay some of) them from other non-expiring revenue (admittedly unbudgeted for this purpose, but still available).

At the end of the meeting, I asked WVNET director Henry Blosser why these monies had not been placed in his agency’s budget.  He shook his head knowingly and smiled.  Twenty-five plus years of government service had taught him not to say too much too soon….

Where are the clowns?…  Send in the clowns….

Isn’t it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air.
Send in the clowns.

As some of you probably have guessed, I have a much more extensive technology background than people viewing my resume otherwise might expect.  The reason: I spent more than eight years of my life discreetly cleaning up messes for two different state agencies, and many of those messes happened to be of the technological variety.

Today I begin to discuss one of those technological debacles in greater detail – the WV2001 project – because so much of relevance to WVNET can be learned from it.  In exposing this spectacle, I make the assumption that all applicable statutes of limitations for crimes of incompetence (no malice was involved) probably have run.

Now turn back your clocks to the period before the first major technology bust when half the world thought an internet startup selling the latest earwax removal product was a sound investment and the other half believed most high school and college classes would be online within five years.  Into this tech-crazy world of the mid- to late-1990s comes Verizon with its knight-in-shining-armour proposal to keep West Virginia from being left behind by constructing a massive ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) infrastructure to support the expected exponential growth in technology use.

Never ones to be left outside the big tent when the circus comes to town, the West Virginia Legislature quickly appropriated $1.5 million annually to cover the State’s price of admission.  This appropriation, which appeared in the West Virginia Department of Education and the Arts’ budget, would support higher education, K-12, library and other agency buy-ins to the bright, shiny, new high-tech ATM network.  The idea was this: the State would pay for higher education institutions to buy and maintain T-1 and DS-3 circuits to transport data, voice, and video for 14 months, at the end of which these circuits would be so central to operations that everyone would print money on their bright, shiny, new high-tech color copiers to keep them.

The circuits, of course, were not cheap: a T-1 line cost $600 per month, a DS-3 line cost $3,800, and an OC-3 line cost $7,200 as I recall.  But there was a bit of a sleight of hand involved because that was not the only charge: T-1 and DS-3 circuits have to connect to other circuits, which the State also purchased.  Circuits that crossed LATAs (discussed in a previous post) were purchased from long distance providers like AT&T, while circuits within LATAs, including organization T-1s and DS-3s, were purchased primarily from West Virginia’s cute little “Baby Bell” Verizon.

On the state government side, the person who took responsibility for this initiative worked for IS&C, the precursor to what is now known at the West Virginia Office of Technology.  As best I can tell, he spent most of his time running around the State making sure everyone got hooked up to these bright, shiny circuits.  What he did not do was bother to keep track of the costs … or pay the bills ….

And watching this technology spectacle from their seats in the balcony, like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show, were the wizened technology veterans at WVNET, who had been in the technology business for more than 25 years….

Isn’t it rich?…