A five-minute agenda item

More than 30 years ago, when I was Director of Special Projects at Customs and Excise, my DG asked me to look into computerizing the pay system.  Luckily, my assistant was a seconded pay clerk who knew the system inside and out.  She might have been a lowly CR 4 or 5, but she was smart.

Being the type of manager who didn't want to re-invent the wheel, I came back from that management committee meeting and said, "Lynne, Ken Cox wants to computerize the pay system.  What do you think?"  "Forget about it," said Lynne.  When I asked why, she said because there were too many variables and special situations to allow it to be administered by one computerized program.  Along with regular pay, the system had to manage acting pay, leave without pay, leave with pay, maternity leave, secondments, sick leave, pre-retirement special assignments, vacation pay, extended leave, disability pay......and on and on.  "All this has to be calculated by hand," explained Lynne.

So, next management meeting, Ken asked me to report and I said exactly what Lynne had said and why.  "Do you mean to tell me that pay still has to be calculated by hand?!" said Ken.  "Yep, the inputting all has to be done by hand before being put into the cheque system.  Then the computer can kick out the cheque, but when an employee's status changes, we have to calculate that again by hand.  I consulted the pay clerks and that's what they told me." I explained.

Having come up through the ranks, the late Ken Cox knew a competent pay clerk when he heard one and when he asked me who I had consulted in pay, I told him it was Lynne.  "I, I know Lynne, she's excellent.  If that's what she says, we'll stick with what we have.  Next item?"  And that was that.  Five minutes and we didn't have a Phoenix. 

Not long after that Customs and Excise merged with Taxation -- another dumb idea conjured up by then Taxation DM, P.G., who had not come up through the ranks.  He had been fast-tracked via a spiffy new program that catapulted "promising" young, mostly-men with lightening speed up through the ranks, thus ensuring they knew nothing about anything.  But had we foolishly computerized pay, P.G. was the type of guy who would've stuck with it because he was a first-class smarty pants, thus destroying the pay system of all the Taxation staff too.

Welcome to the disaster that is still going on because another smarty pants at IBM sold the feds a system for millions that didn't work.  It has now cost more than $2 billion over three years and it's still a mess.  Initially there were 260,000 tickets for each mess and wow!  They're now down to only 173,000.  Each ticket has to be fixed guess how?  By a pay clerk by hand with a calculator.

Now I read that all employees -- even those whose pay had not been effed up -- are getting $2,400 each for the trauma and hardship they have suffered thanks to the smarty pants who apparently didn't even consult the pay people when he hired IBM!  So, that's another $350 million wasted.

I know I have blogged about this before, but it still baffles me that people can be so dumb.  I am not a pay clerk and my first job out of university was with IBM, so I know how that company operates.  It wants to sell "its" systems -- not adapt its system to your needs.  All somebody had to have done was give me a quick call and then tell IBM, no thanks.

But, of course, that's not what happened.  Thank God they didn't put superannuation cheques into Phoenix!