Our New Governor Should Upgrade State's Sorry Technology

Our New Governor Should Upgrade State's Sorry Technology

Congratulations, Mr. Ige. You snagged a first-class seat to the technology time-warp.

I wanted to call you on my rotary phone to personally salute you, but I’m still waiting for my canvas trousers to dry in the wind.

The year? 2014. Somewhere in a windowless Honolulu office, five clerks process Hawaii’s $130 million payroll on a biweekly basis. Like underpaid artisans, they perform their work primarily by hand, with only the help of a COBOL application running on a 40-year-old VAX computer that’s barely kept alive with a mishmash of parts purchased on eBay. The clerks check and recheck their calculations, pencilling department totals into paper ledgers.

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