New voter registration system falls flat - Who knew?

[sybylla]

New voter registration system falls flat
Area clerks call it unwieldy
By Judith Davidoff
December 28, 2005
http://www.madison.com/tct/mad/topstories/index.php?ntid=66687&ntpid=0

Municipal clerks around Dane County are finding the state's costly new voter registration system maddeningly slow and unwieldy.

In fact, pilot testing of the program has virtually ceased while bugs in the system being developed by contractor Accenture LLC are worked out.

"It's not intuitive," said Maria Van Cleve, clerk of the town of Mazomanie, in a recent interview.

"Since it's supposedly gone live we've run into a lot of roadblocks," said Luann Alme, city clerk for Stoughton. "We've just taken a step back until we hear the program is workable. Until then we're not going to spend a lot of time working on it."

***SNIP***

Of course, Accenture blames the problems on the clerks - their not competent, they don't have their shit together,etc.

Now, if there is one category of employment where one would be prepared to handle data entry and recognize a crap program when they see it, it would be the clerks at the county courthouses across this state. But I could be wrong. :shrug:

Having spent a fair amount of time doing data entry 8 hours a day myself, I can personally vouch that it doesn't take much time working with a program to realize it's crap.

[htuttle]

1. Didn't 'Accenture' used to be known as 'Arthur Anderson'?

When all of your users rebel and refuse to use a data entry program, the problem is most definitely with the software, not the users.

I'd bet that they didn't talk to the clerks enough while they were writing it. In fact, that's almost always the problem when data entry programs suck...(having written many business data entry programs myself). Writing a data entry program that data entry clerks really like is actually quite hard. You really almost have to spend a few weeks looking over their shoulders and asking a lot of questions (and then being prepared to roll out revisions ASAP as it comes online). Given it's long experience sucking on the teat of government contracts, I'm sure "Accenture" did none of those things...

[RevCheesehead]

2. Can we get a refund?

Let's at least make this a major issue against the state repukes who pushed this through.