(TNS) — “Go Live.”
After a decade of planning within Idaho government agencies, a team of state leaders began using the term for July 1, 2023 — the date Idaho’s computer networks will transition to the new system as part of an effort to modernize accounting, hiring and employee reviews.
When the new software systems went live, they changed the daily tasks and workflows of thousands of government employees.
For proponents of the project, called Luma, the new software was a $102 million boost that brings the state better security, record-keeping and management tools and pushed Idaho ahead of others across the country as the first to fully implement a cloud-based system. The last time Idaho overhauled its processes to this extent was in the 1980s.
But for some employees, the transition has meant headaches and trouble, filling finance employees’ days with error messages, adding to their workload and even making it harder to track down government revenue and expenses.
Some challenges with the new system lasted months and caused problems with payments to contractors, delaying invoices worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Frustrations were widespread enough to reach Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle, who told Lumia operators at a Nov. 2 meeting to consider a plan B because “this thing is a joke,” according to the Idaho Capital Sun.
For some field staff, the changes have brought them to tears of frustration over basic tasks such as transferring money between agencies.
“It was a very, very simple process in the old system,” said one financial employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “The new system is absolutely insane.”
System intended for modernization, process improvement
In 2014, the Idaho Legislature authorized a study to review the state’s technology systems. The effort was led by the Comptroller’s Office, a lesser-known branch of state government charged with managing fiscal operations.
One problem was security. The state’s human resources, procurement, finance and accounting management software resided on an on-site hard drive in the Comptroller’s Office in downtown Boise. A longer power outage or a cyber attack could mean that the country can’t pay its bills.
Another problem was the diversity of management across the state’s 85 agencies, some of which had different methods for processing invoices and other needs, Josh Whitworth, deputy comptroller general, said in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. He said that the state wants to standardize all these processes, partly because before some ways of doing office work were mainly located in the heads of a few employees and were transmitted orally.
By 2019, when implementation began, most modern computing systems had moved to cloud-based models, where information and software are located off-site and accessed online. Software packages are now also largely subscription-based, with security updates and bug fixes regularly released by technology companies.
The new umbrella venture includes subscriptions for human resources recruitment, staff development, performance appraisal and accounting through Infor, a New York company; budget development software through Sherpa, a Chicago company; and other software. The comptroller’s office hired two consultants — McKinsey and Deloitte — to help with the transition.
‘A big fight every day’
The state’s switch to a suite of new software programs has irked many finance employees, who said the situation has led to problems with accounting and in-state payment processing. Salary payments and travel expenses for some employees have been delayed, said a financial employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“It was a big struggle every day,” the employee said. “We keep hitting walls.”
The employee said that the system often crashes, which slows down the workflow. Lumin’s help desk requires employees to submit trouble tickets online; these employees are still learning how to use the system themselves.
“It’s like the blind leading the blind in some situations,” said the financial employee.
Instead of halting certain job functions, the employee said the issues instead halted all of their work, leading to much longer processing times, delays in reconciling transactions and the need for additional staff.
“Billing between companies is an absolute nightmare,” the employee said.
The move to an electronic transfer system was intended to save money, but it’s hard to see how costs have been cut when it takes financial employees much longer to process each transfer, the employee said.
The employee said the help desk is well-intentioned and sometimes helpful, but often the repairs don’t work and new tickets have to be sent.
The employee said that they are in favor of modernizing the state’s financial systems, just “not in this way”.
“I was so frustrated I had tears in my eyes and it never happened,” the employee said. “It hasn’t gotten any easier at all.”
‘Something must be done’
In October, Chemung Supply, a New York-based supply company, emailed the Idaho Department of Transportation to say it hadn’t received payment for a more than $163,000 invoice after two months.
“We’ve been very patient, but now we’re at the point where something needs to be done,” company employee Jodi McNeal said in an email. McNeal told the Statesman in a follow-up email that there were “hits along the way” in processing the invoices, but they have since been resolved and the company hopes to do business with ITD in the future.
Another company, Cyclomedia, checked with ITD employees in November, nearly two months after submitting invoices for more than $462,000. ITD employees replied that they thought the payments had already gone through.
“ITD is working with the new ‘Luma’ system and we are identifying some issues,” wrote one company employee.
An employee of Fisher’s Technology sent an email to ITD in late November because that company was also having problems.
“Enclosed is another bill that we were told was paid, and your Luma internet portal shows that it has been paid. We have not received payment for this invoice,” the employee wrote.
A spokesman for the Comptroller’s Office, Christopher Davis, told the Statesman by phone that the issues with the three companies have been resolved.
The implementation of Luma also led to some duplicate payments.
About $32 million in payments to the Department of Health and Human Services doubled in November because of a processing error between the new Luma programs and state agencies. Davis said the problem was an “isolated incident” — the agency has returned most of the money and expects to return the rest soon.
Government agencies also have problems with reporting, which is the accounting process of showing an agency’s financial status.
The Idaho Legislature’s top budget official told lawmakers in January that the Office of Legislative Services cannot “independently verify” the agency’s cash balances.
Idaho State Employees Retirement System Chief Financial Officer Alex Simpson told the Public Employees Retirement System board in December that his staff members were still having problems with reporting.
“We think we know what we’re doing, but maybe we don’t,” he said. “There was a time when I said, ‘Well, do this and see if it works,’ and that’s not a good way to do accounting.”
In a follow-up email to the Statesman, Simpson said through a spokesperson, “We are working on all the challenges and seeing general improvements in the system. PERSI appreciates the opportunity to learn more about the many features of Luma.”
Whitworth said he thinks much of the upset over Luma stems from the challenges of transitioning to a new way of working, especially if state finance officials are used to old systems.
“Some individuals were so comfortable with the previous processes that they found it difficult to update,” he said. “We’ve taken these people who were very confident when they hit in the old world, to – they kind of hesitate. So that process is currently slower. And so I think it’s been slower for some suppliers.”
Whitworth also said that ITD is the only agency — other than the university — that has been delayed from the July 1 Luma implementation date due to the complexity of its finances, and has instead been manually entering information from its old system into the Luma system. before processing the payment.
In an email, Davis said “the total number of outstanding payments is only a fraction of the percentage of total payments that have gone through the system.”
‘The system works. You can’t just turn it off’
Whitworth said he is confident the new state systems will show a big improvement over the previous software, but acknowledged there have been hiccups in the transition.
“The change process means our employees have a better experience over time,” he said.
Whitworth said some of the previous computer systems the state used were so outdated that they could no longer be updated with added security protocols or customizations, largely because people were no longer trained to use the software.
If the state were to change employee health insurance, he said, reprogramming the old system would take a year.
Instead of an array of physical hard drives that could be vulnerable to extended power outages, Whitworth said the cloud-based system is backed up across the country and is therefore more resilient. It also requires 85 state agencies to use largely the same processes, ending what Whitworth said was a long-standing practice of processing invoices and transactions in isolation.
He said two significant issues that arose were the transfer of data from the previous fiscal year and the challenge Moyle mentioned, insight into government revenues and expenditures.
An executive carryover is a process that allows agencies to spend money appropriated in one year during the next fiscal year. When the July 1 “activation” occurred, the Luma team assumed there wouldn’t be as many outstanding contracts and planned for agencies to manually enter each one instead of programming the conversion data, Whitworth said.
But some agencies had more than 1,000 contracts to transfer, leading to hours of manual entry for some employees.
“The prioritization and activities probably could have been better in that case,” Whitworth said.
As for agency reporting, Whitworth said he could have better organized that process as well, and that while the information was available all the time, it required coordination between state agencies that didn’t start on the same page.
“I had to put all these people in a room,” he said, noting that since then agencies can see their income and expenses. “I think that problem is solved today.”
Ultimately, Whitworth said the state should stick with its new systems and get used to them.
“To actually make the jump for an enterprise the size of the state of Idaho to where we are today with the cloud suite and the modernizations and the opportunities that are in front of us now, I think is a great achievement for the state of Idaho and a great opportunity for us to lead our peers again,” Whitworth said.
He also said that the state cannot return.
“Putting it out doesn’t solve anything,” he said. “This is not a system problem, this is a process and education problem.
“The system works. You can’t just turn it off and put a new one on.”
© 2024 The Idaho Statesman. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.