Ctrl-Alt-Delete and a System Reboot for Virginia

It was more than a week ago, on Aug. 25, that all heck broke loose in a computer server facility outside Richmond.

A switch failed on the primary system, a backup redundancy failed to kick in and pretty sizable chunk of state government just ground to a screeching halt.

The network crash interrupted service to 26 of 89 executive branch agencies whose systems ran off the affected servers. Most notably, the Department of Motor Vehicles was down for a full week, during which time all of the agency’s customer service offices were offline. No driver’s license renewals, no title transfers. Nothing.

It was like that across a wide swath of Virginia’s government for an entire week.

Northrup-Grumman manages the state government’s computer network under a $2 billion contract entered into during the administration of Gov. Mark Warner at the height of the “privatization is good” push in the early part of this decade.

Since Northrup-Grumman, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, took over the day-to-day operations of the state network, it has been fraught with complaints from agencies, civil service employees and members of the General Assembly. Overbilling. Slow implementation of promised upgrades. Shoddy customer service.

And matters were made even worse because there was little apparent recourse for the state. Because of how the contract with Northrup-Grumman was written and because the “oversight” panel was really just window-dressing, many of the problems went uncorrected and unaddressed until political pressure was applied to Northrup-Grumman. The Virginia Information Technologies Agency, which is supposed to “oversee” Northrup-Grumman, was itself restructured in the wake of massive problems Media General’s Richmond Times-Dispatch documented earlier this year.

In the wake of the massive outage, it is imperative that state government leaders determine what went wrong and why it took so long for the network to come back up.

To that end, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Thursday that his office and the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC), the investigative arm of the General Assembly, would be commissioning an independent review of the incident and Northrup-Grumman’s handling of it. The company, quite appropriately, will be footing the bill for the review.

General Assembly leaders and JLARC officials have been critical of Northrup-Grumman almost from the beginning, citing shortcomings in how company officials interacted with state agencies — their customers — and what many saw as gouging of the taxpayers with shoddy service and high costs.

There are things that private industry can do better and more efficiently than government. It may well be that administering a massive computer network is one of those jobs.

But as the governor said Thursday, “This recent computer failure is unacceptable.”

He’s right. The taxpayers, who are Northrup-Grumman’s ultimate bosses, deserve better. If the week-long recovery is found to be the result of North-Grumman’s deficiencies, then the state ought to consider seriously whether this is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.