What Can Big Blue do for You? Apparently Not Much.

A lot has been said about the failure of Texas' efforts to privatize their welfare system under Accenture. So how has IBM faired at privatization?


"An $80 million contract to build a gigantic data repository for over 1 million students and teachers in North Carolina has ended acrimoniously, turning into a war of words between contractor IBM Corp. and state officials.
“We have told IBM that we’re terminating the project for failure to perform,” says Vanessa Jeter, public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. She would not reveal specific details.
The initiative, called the North Carolina Window of Information on Student Education (NC WISE), is a Web-based system for collating and analyzing student data, such as report cards and transcripts. But the system -- developed by IBM -- has been dogged by systems crashes and major delays."

Mitch can talk about incompetence and fraud within FSSA all he wants, but replacing it with privatized incompetence and fraud isn't a solution. And for what its worth, all these "dirty" departments of state government that Mitch railed against, what has he done to clean them up?