California Dmv Case
California DMV In 1987, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) embarked on a major project to revitalize their driver’s license and registration application process. DMV’s project was supposed to deliver everything that the department was looking for: ability to track of the state's 31 million drivers' licenses and 38 million vehicle registrations. By 1993, after $45 million dollars had already been spent, the project was canceled. The San Francisco Chronicle described the situation as "an unworkable system that could not be fixed without the expenditure of millions more." According to a special report issued by DMV, the primary reason for redeveloping this application was the adoption new technology. They publicly stated: "The specific objective of the 1987 project was to use modern technology to support the DMV mission and sustain its growth by strategically positioning the DMV data processing environment to rapidly respond to change." Also, according to the DMV special report "The phasing was changed several times, but the DMV technical community was never truly confident in its viability....". Moreover, State’s legislators were not confident about the project and the way it was handled. They were primarily concerned with the project manager who was a recent college graduate with strong ties to the governor’s political party. Since the employees of DMV were mostly in favor of the rival of the governor in the last election, the PM simply did not consult with the employees about what they want from such a new system. The PM was also a technology enthusiast. Hence, he wanted the system to be developed inhouse from scratch. The PM believed that they should not waste anytime; hence he assembled a development team in his second day as the PM and asked developers to start coding right after meeting with them. Since he ignored the norms/practices of the IT department at DMV, he lost the support of the state's IT staff from the beginning. Further, PM also lost