The Department of Children and Families has canceled its $830,000 computer systems contract with Georgian IT firm Yahasoft over a troubled data management project started in April 2011.
The VFACTS computer system, undertaken by DCF, aims to track data on children and families, including sensitive medical information, so the state can better provide services and spot trends.
But state officials say that Yahasoft failed to understand the state’s contract properly, and couldn’t keep the database secure enough to match mandated federal standards regarding medical and health care data.
Yahasoft and the state mutually agreed to terminate their contract late last month, said Reeva Murphy, a deputy commissioner with DCF’s Child Development Division, the unit in charge of VFACTS.
“This project was conceived in the whole ‘Challenges for Change’ movement, and there wasn’t a full review at the outset,” said Murphy, referring to an initiative under Gov. Jim Douglas which saw some state projects bypass administrative checks in an attempt to streamline government.
“I just think that the vendor didn’t quite know how stringent we would be on the security requirements,” said Murphy. “There was a lot of change happening in IT, a change in administrations, so I think the project itself was caught up in changes to the way we do business. … It was just a little project that kind of got caught up in a lot of change.”
Murphy said that the state will likely not request a refund for the almost $424,000 it’s already paid Yahasoft, saying that Yahasoft delivered some useful products, and that the state and Yahasoft had negotiated in good faith.
But no concrete hardware or software has emerged from Yahasoft’s work so far. Since the system will be web-based, there’s no hardware to speak of, while the system already under development consists of proprietary web code, which belongs to Yahasoft and which can’t be used by the state.
Still, Murphy said that project specifications and business documents drawn up during the contract would represent retained value for the state, with enough detail remaining there for the department to finish the project using internal DCF and state IT staff, rather than external contractors.
She hoped that VFACTS could be completed by the end of 2013.
Yahasoft CEO Roy Su declined to comment on the project’s failure, citing advice from his attorney amid ongoing negotiations. Su declined to address the persistent charges by state officials Yahasoft remained chiefly at fault for failing to understand the original contract.
According to emails obtained through a public records request, Laurie Sabens, an IT manager at DCF, persistently raised red flags about the progress of VFACTS throughout 2011 and 2012, advising DCF Commissioner Dave Yacovone that the department should consider halting the project as early as October 2011.
Sabens wrote in a June 14, 2012, email to Yacovone: “As Angela [the chief information officer for the Agency of Human Services] mentioned today, this vendor surpasses all other “horror stories” of vendors in our combined experience.”
The state’s chief IT officer, Richard Boes, estimated last month that initial total project cost for VFACTS stood at about $4 million. This includes state staff time and expenses, alongside a $391,000 contract for Berry Dunn, an IT firm charged with independently overseeing the project, and $100,000 to IT consultant Pete Walker, among other costs.
