When a county government outsourced its IT to one of the big global IT shops, they expected costs to be reduced and processes streamlined. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out quite that way.

Here’s What Happened
Despite what we’re sure was everyone’s best efforts, things seemed to go to hell in a hand-basket (yeah, we’re not sure where that expression comes from either). Rather than efficiencies and cost reductions that would lead to improved services for its citizenry, folks in the department instead spent hours in large meetings trying to resolve issues, had unscheduled system downtime (sometimes for days on end), source code fell out of sync with deployed systems, planned improvements were tabled – all culminating in runaway expense without a clear return on investment. To top things off, users stopped reporting issues, believing they would never get fixed. Eventually the agency transitioned to a new global IT shop, but things didn’t change much. Finally, the agency gave us a call to see if there was a way we could assist.

This Is Where We Come In
The ClearWave Crew audited the source code and reverse engineered the missing elements. After interviewing users we set up a prioritized list of issues and created a clear roadmap working on both architectural issues for system stability and user-prioritized issues. To restore user confidence, we put a process in place to receive and respond to user reported issues as our top priority. The net effect has been that we can now make system improvements quickly and efficiently, users are using the system and providing the department with terrific ideas that help improve business processes, and morale has turned around. The client management system that had cost millions of dollars and thousands of personnel hours to create works effectively to meet their needs and hasn’t had a moment of unscheduled downtime.

We Can Help You Save the Day if any of these aspects of this organization’s story are true for you too:

• A project you anticipated would lead to cost reductions and improved efficiencies has turned into a runaway train wreck of expense with little value to show for it
• You and your users experience intermittent unscheduled down times that lasts anywhere from hours to days
• You have a sinking feeling that instability in the system means you have bigger problems than originally thought. You’d like to figure out what the condition of the code actually is and what sort of gotchas live there.
• You’re spending lots of time and money in large meetings with spread sheets, charts, and graphs, but little is being done to improve the software
• Small “work arounds” and renegade software projects have sprang up to attempt to overcome system deficiencies
• You need a small, capable, dedicated crew- a technical SWAT team if you will- to come in and work with you to identify the issues (the good, the bad and the ugly) and then address them
• You hear curses under the breath of users whenever they discuss the software
• Your name is being used as a verb- and not in a good way (o.k., that wasn’t really happening, but we thought we’d throw that in just in case it’s true for you).

ClearWave Software – We’re Not Your Ordinary Software Company