California Department of Motor Vehicles: an information system that failed

In 1987 the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) hired Tandem Computers and the consulting company Ernst & Young replace its aging mainframes and merge its massive drivers license and vehicle registration databases. Seven years and $44 million later the DMV threw in the towel, leaving it tracking 50 million vehicle registrations and driver's licenses and $5.2 billion of fees per year using vehicle and driver's license systems first written for RCA Computers in 1965. These applications currently run on IBM ES/9000 mainframes and have a 220 Gbyte database. According to the Automobile Club of Southern California, which has 5,000 terminals tied to these mainframes, retrieval of data works acceptably for them, although insufficient communication ports are a problem. The challenges for the DMV at this point start with reengineering business processes throughout the department to conform with new legislative mandates such as a motor/voter program. Technical challenges include moving the 220 Gbyte database to a relational database so that flexible reporting would be possible, rewriting ancient, poorly written programs, replacing around 300 communication computers, and replacing 40,000 dumb terminals whose maintenance contracts expire in several years.

The California legislature approved a $500,000 expenditure to find out what happened. Tandem claimed that its $20 million of computer gear and relational database software were operating, but that no applications had been loaded on the system. Ernst & Young had withdrawn from the project in 1990 citing differences with the DMV about project direction. DMV staffers had tried to develop applications themselves using the Texas Instruments CASE tool called IEF, but were surprised at how difficult the learning curve was. The programs written so far couldn't perform some basic functions and operated 10 times slower than the old system.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this case and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. Use the traditional system life cycle to explain some of the things that went wrong in this case.

Sources: Bozman, Jean S. "DMV disaster: California kills failed $44M project." Computerworld, May 9, 1994, p.1;
King, Ralph T., Jr., "California DMV's Computer Overhaul Ends Up as Costly Ride to Junk Heap." Wall Street Journal, Apr. 27, 1994, p. B5.

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