Hawaii government technology stuck in time warp

In most places such work is done on computers, but in Hawaii decades of putting technology funding on the backburner has led to an environment where state workers process payroll the same way they did 40 years ago, when offices were commonly equipped with rotary phones.

The longhand accounting is an extreme example of how essential functions across state government are performed with minimal or antiquated technology, forcing employees to spend large chunks of time on a preponderance of paper records and manual tasks that breed inefficiency and waste taxpayer dollars.

Now, Hawaii's first chief information officer wants to lift the state into the 21st century, leapfrogging into a world where residents might be able to get their child's report card and pay taxes using a mobile app on their smartphone or tablet computer.

"We can skip those 20, 30 years. We can skip cassettes. We can skip CD and DVD and go straight to cloud," said Hawaii's CIO, Sanjeev "Sonny" Bhagowalia, referring to online virtual information storage.

To get there, Bhagowalia and his team must modernize and integrate a labyrinth of equipment and software across more than a dozen departments and other state entities such as Hawaii's public schools and hospitals. Bhagowalia's team has counted 743 different systems and databases —including separate email systems for each department.

Then, there are the functions that have never been computerized — like Hawaii's $130 million payroll.

Traci Fujita, central payroll supervisor, and four clerks use calculators to tabulate department payroll data on papers that are delivered by hand to another group that enters the figures in a computer system. If there's a discrepancy, Fujita's team goes through paper records one by one to determine whether numbers were input incorrectly or a department's figures are wrong. Only then may the state send 70,000 to 80,000 paychecks every two weeks.

"Even 30 years ago they had said they were going to move away from this," Fujita said. "And 30 years later it's still here."

Another example of the sort of institutional inefficiency that leads to wasteful, overlapping effort arises when employees request time off.

To go on vacation or take leave for jury duty, state workers must submit a request on a paper form, which a supervisor must sign before sending it along to a division or department head. It can take two weeks or more for leave to be tallied. Sometimes papers are sent to another office only to be lost and forms need to be filled out all over again.

"A lot of this activity is just people going around in circles. It's activity not to be confused with progress," Bhagowalia said.

Making do without modern technology is hard, and Bhagowalia called employees heroes for managing.

"But having said that, it's time to really give them computing. You shouldn't have to deal with that," he said.

Bhagowalia blames 30 years of underinvestment in technology for the current situation.