Doug Koelemay’s VITA column Monday stimulated another reader to write. This comes from a VITA employee who provided me his name, but asked me not to publish it for fear of retribution. Says the state employee:
Make no mistake about it, VITA is solely interested in empire and Warner-legacy building, not in customer service or saving the taxpayers of this state money. The vast majority of the agencies are now being driven by VITA, not by their constituents’ needs. We are constantly being forced to submit to their audits and surveys. We are paying huge fees for services that prior to their existence cost us nothing more than the salaries we were already paying. VITA is a train wreck waiting to happen and Governor Warner will be lucky to be out of office before the train derails. The only hope the taxpayers of Virginia have is that JLARC steps in and prevents this disaster. However, seeing as how the Republican leadership in the General Assembly sold out to Mark Warner, I don’t hold out much hope.
I can go on and on with examples of how VITA has been improperly managed and launched, but I am a mere grunt worker in their eyes. I’ve been repeatedly told that I don’t understand the top-down perspective. I guess I’ll just keep walking back and forth to VITA headquarters every other day to reboot my servers that no longer operate with the efficiency they did prior to our server move. Rest assured that Warner’s only legacy in my mind will be the frustration I experience every couple of months when I have to replace my shoes.
I have no idea whether or not this correspondent has a reasonable beef or not. But it’s clear that a number of people in VITA have yet to see the logic.