Adam Summers: Calling 911 over California’s failed IT projects

California might have to call 911 to save its emergency communications system upgrade project. Whether the call would actually get through is another matter.

While the Golden State prides itself on its innovative technology sector and the genius, in Silicon Valley and beyond, these private sector successes have yet to be replicated in the state government. The failure to upgrade the state’s 911 system is just the latest example of this ineptitude.

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) set out to upgrade the state’s 911 system in 2019. The Next Generation 911 project sought to provide dispatchers with enhanced location services, allow the public to utilize other forms of communication such as texts and introduce redundancies to prevent widespread failures in the system. A July 2017 Cal OES slideshow described the existing system as “based on 1970s technology,” with “infrastructure beyond end of life,” and concluded that it “does not meet the needs of current technology.”

The project relied on a novel approach, not used in any other state, which divided California into four regions, each with a different provider. Unfortunately, after six years and more than $450 million spent, the system largely failed to work and Cal OES has terminated the project. It now plans to begin again with a statewide design similar to other states, which will likely take at least several more years and hundreds of millions more dollars to complete.

As I noted in a September 2020 Independent Institute report, IT project failures have become an unsettling trend in California state government. “[B]etween 1994 and 2013, the state terminated or suspended seven IT projects after spending almost $1 billion,” the State Auditor’s Office reported in 2015.

The State Auditor’s Office has repeatedly named the government’s IT infrastructure and security as one of the “high risk” issues facing the state. In an August 2023 report, for example, the state auditor criticized the California Department of Technology yet again, citing “weaknesses in CDT’s strategic planning, oversight of information security and IT projects,” and noting that “CDT has not ensured that the state’s IT systems are adequately protected from cyberattacks.”

One well-known example of the state’s IT project struggles is the Financial Information System for California, known as FI$Cal, which integrated the state’s accounting, budgeting, cash management and procurement systems. The project was plagued with delays, cost increases and substantial changes in scope and goals. It ultimately cost the state more than $1 billion and was declared completed after 16 years, even though some planned functions had not been implemented and some departments were not yet utilizing the system. Even after implementation, the state has suffered from repeated failures to produce timely financial statements, which could jeopardize the state’s credit rating and force it to incur higher borrowing costs.

Other examples are numerous. The State Controller’s Office tried and failed for 21 years to upgrade its payroll and human resources system, beginning in 1999 with the 21st Century Project. (The project dragged on so long that the novelty of the name wore off and it had to be rebranded as MyCalPays.) Then there was the $500 million failure to implement the California Court Case Management System for the state’s 58 county courts, the Employment Development Department’s struggles to update its antiquated technology to answer calls and process unemployment benefits, the BreEZe occupational licensing system that more than tripled in cost from $28 million to $96 million and was only adopted by a small portion of boards and commissions before being killed in 2015, the failed Statewide Child Support System in the 1990s that cost the state $1 billion in fines to the federal government due to delays and the numerous IT project failures at the Department of Motor Vehicles going back to the 1980s.

To be sure, large IT projects sometimes fail or exceed their budgets in the private sector, too, but at least there are much greater incentives to fix problems that arise and ensure accountability. Moreover, private companies typically do not wait until their technology is 50 years old before they contemplate upgrading it.

At the very least, the state should take measures to hold leadership and support staff accountable for project performance, improve oversight, utilize performance-based contracts to reward contractors for good performance—and punish them for poor performance—and otherwise structure contracts to shift risk from taxpayers to the contractors. It must make better efforts at initial project planning, including conducting reasonable cost-benefit analyses and a business case justification for projects, in order to avoid costly changes and delays later on.

Otherwise, the state that sees itself as leading into the future will be stuck in the technological past.

Adam B. Summers is a columnist, economist, and public policy analyst, and a former editorial writer for the Orange County Register / Southern California News Group. He is also editor and coauthor of “Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions.”