TEXAS

Elections system pulled from IBM data center contract

Company's failures could have jeopardized 'fair, credible elections,' secretary of state's office says.

IBM Corp.'s failure to protect state information under an $863 million data center consolidation contract has prompted the Texas secretary of state's office to pull its elections system from the project.

In August, the secretary of state got a "wake-up call" when a server crash led to a 13-day outage of the agency's business records filing system. It exposed serious weaknesses in IBM's ability to recover lost data, said secretary of state spokesman Randall Dillard.

"We couldn't allow the ability to conduct fair, credible elections to be jeopardized," Dillard said.

The agency was granted approval in September from Gov. Rick Perry's office and the Department of Information Resources, which is overseeing the contract, to withdraw its elections system from the contract and set up its own data operation with two separate backup locations.

The secretary of state is not alone. Most of the 27 agencies involved in the data center consolidation have expressed frustration with the project. A survey of the agencies' information technology directors taken in the spring found that 88 percent of them were dissatisfied with the services provided by IBM.

Perry spokesman Chris Cutrone said that maintaining the integrity of the elections system was paramount.

The attempts to get the elections system installed and tested at the consolidated data center were marred by missed deadlines, equipment and software failure, inadequate disaster recovery and other problems, Cutrone said.

"We reached the point where we were no longer confident that Team for Texas could get servers and software for the elections system installed and properly tested," Cutrone said, referring to the IBM-led partnership.

Federal money that pays for the mandated statewide voter registration system will cover the $7.9 million cost of the new data home for the elections system, known as Texas Elections Administration Management, Dillard said.

The secretary of state's data system will probably operate independently at least through the 2011 redistricting process, Dillard said.

When issues related to "inadequate performance and service" with the data center project are resolved, the agency will rejoin the effort, Secretary of State Hope Andrade wrote in a September letter to the Department of Information Resources.

"Until then, we simply cannot put the Texas election system at risk," Andrade wrote.

IBM spokesman Jeff Tieszen said the company would work with the Department of Information Resources during the transition. He declined to address the specific criticism by Andrade.

Under the seven-year contract, IBM is merging the separate data centers of 27 state agencies into two streamlined and updated facilities. The objective of the contract is to save money and improve security.

But the project has been plagued with service issues, slow progress and high-profile data losses. A December completion date looms for IBM to get all the agencies' operations running in the consolidated centers but, as of this summer, the process was far behind schedule.

In 2008, the loss of some critical state data at the office of the attorney general led Perry to suspend consolidation until IBM ensured that the state's data was protected. Although the consolidation resumed, the problems have persisted.

On the heels of the secretary of state outage, the attorney general suffered another loss of data related to Medicaid fraud cases, just as it had in 2008.

Cutrone said the attorney general's office had not asked to withdraw from the consolidation and its problems were different from those faced by the secretary of state.

The Department of Information Resources has taken steps recently to put the project back on track.

There is a new agency head, a high-level executive solely responsible for the data center contract, and an independent review is under way to identify the problems with the project and recommend changes. That report is due next week.

kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618