First, let's gaze upon the fruits of ALL of your labor!!!! On one hand, it made me feel REALLY good to see those numbers in writing! I felt so proud of YOU FOLKS for doing this...it sure wasn't me!
And I admit it, I felt a tad bit grateful to C4P and especially the Stapletongue for opening that gargantuan mouth and shortening our fundraiser probably by days!
However, all of that is replaced by the anger I feel over the games the Palin Administration plays on every level to keep their activities secret.
Let's go back to several weeks ago, before icons and desecrations and pageant pictures in running magazines...back to trying to get over the initial shock of how much an "open and transparent Governor" actually costs a private citizen.
Let's go back to when we DARED to ask for a fee waiver and see the response!!!
UNDER $5.00?? Really??? So if Father Fiorelli at Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt made a records request of all emails dealing with charitable work, you guys would charge him if it was over $5.00???
Wow, that I'd like to see!!!! Oh...but wait...it will cost me an arm and a leg to prove it, won't it?
Nice little racket you guys have going here!
Now comes the responses to my computer guru's questions:
Oh, yeah, that's much clearer and in layman's terms...except that it doesn't even make sense to the computer guys!
And I loved the part about "I don't have a breakdown of time for each task nor can I produce it. We are not tracking our time to that level of detail..."
I see...so that's the story you give to the State budget people when one Department feels they are being overcharged for your services? You are saying that you cannot provide them proof to the contrary? Or is it that you just don't WANT to give them to us so that we cannot point out the amount of time you are charging us for overnight functions when no one is working...those labor-free calculations? But that's covered in the next questions...
So the answer to #2 is "yes" and not-so-amazingly, so is the answer to #3!!!!!
"Reasonable processing time is chargeable..." Realize, pretty much EVERY AGENCY does its "processing" overnight, while the IT department is at home in bed and if there is a night worker, he/she is reading a book or catching up on his/her email. So exactly how is it "reasonable" to charge me $54.84/hr FOR UNMANNED COMPUTER CALCULATIONS??
Here's a direct response to this letter from a System Administrator at a government agency:
Getting someone's current email mailbox from the exchange email server should not be that lengthy of a task. Even with a large mailbox, it is something that can be started and left to run. Multiple mailboxes can be done at the same time.
Converting the e-mail to a .pst file would be part of pulling a user's email from teh exchange server. There would be no need to convert it as a separate process. Again, if it is going to take a while, it can be started and left alone until completed. Multiple email accounts can be handled this way.
The SSO team uses this Paraben search tool to look for email. It will only search "reasonable sized blocks" of data at a time. This is really bizarre as using something like Microsoft Office Outlook will search the entire .pst at a time and you only have to start it once. If you combined all the various .pst files into a single file, you could perform one search and be done with it.
Here are comments from a computer expert in the private sector regarding explanations given by the State's computer geniuses, Enterprise Technology Services:
They need the .PST files from Outlook for the individuals requested for that period of time, then run those files through Electronic Discovery software to put into a text searchable format. IPro EDD for example. This I know since I do it for a living every day. We do it all the time for attorneys.
Since it is unknown how many pages these collections will be, the onus is on THEM to meet the strictures of the narrowed request. That means they don't hand you a stack of 200,000 email and say "here you go", they just give you the ones responsive to the request. All the extra charges for winnowing through them should be born by the state and it's obviously outdated and ill equipped IT department. It is not your responsibility to pay for their inefficiency nor do you need an explaination of "boo-hoo our job is so hard". They're paid much better than I am and have state benefits. They should do their jobs before the F.B.I. marches in there, seizes it all and brings it to me to do their jobs for them.
Even with all the technical jargon, it's more than obvious that something stinks.
By the way, if you read this and YOU have any questions about the Office of the Governor's email and records request process, the Director of ETS (Information Technology) is:
Anand Dubey
anand.dubey@alaska.gov
(907)269-5744
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