I do think that more people are beginning to wake up to the usurpations that are being perpetrated against the American people.

There is no incentive to be faster and or more efficient. There is no competition and there is no sharing of any kind. There is no incentive to share money, resources, talent or anything amongst agencies. We work directly with about 28 agencies from Police to fire to cities to county agencies. There are only incentives to kingdom build and create disharmony amongst each other on departmental level to agency level.

I deal with people who don’t care, who don’t understand nor want to and/or aren’t qualified to run important systems. There are many who try and do the best job possible but they are few and far between. I could write a tell all book about the Salt Lake County Government alone.
There are no risks and rewards for anything. You can never really get rid of the dead weight of underachievement. After a 6 months when you leave probation it is difficult to be fired for anything short of an arrest for a serious crime. Government is full of never was’s or won’t ever be’s. People who can’t hack it in the free market system.

I can share with you one of my experiences. I have spent 4.7 years trying to convert information contained in books and books at each of the 34 workstations on our call taking floor. It is literally thousands of pages and take the information put it all into electronic format that is easy to search, sort and update and have revision control for 9-1-1 call takers.

I have been sabotaged by every trick in the book by employees low to high including being banished, formal discipline and endless threats. I have been called every name in the book, to my face, in email, on the phone and even on Facebook. I have battled through people who can’t even use Word to create a document to people who used fear and scare tactics to create a backlash about putting data into electronic format.

My motto over the years has become “I will succeed in spite of them”.

The project has been mostly free. FREE….

The software has been free open source, the server was an extra one I pieced together and the only real cost has been my time which has been less than 10% of my daily time to get this project together and it was always after my other jobs were done each day. It was done in my free time at work.

The project finally has made some huge steps in the last 6 months and I have digitized into a wiki site more than 5000 paper documents. I have trained nearly 200 employees how to post their files, edit their posts etc. In addition to this I have created online training classes that use video, and other means to train on this and any other training need including testing and progress tracking. This is all free…

Very few people understand the work, the struggle and fight to cut costs and increase dramatically efficiency.

Other than my boss, the IT Manager and a few call takers I haven’t been recognized in any way shape or form for speeding up and standardizing call processing, reducing costs and inaccuracies in policy and procedure documentation. I didn’t earn employee of the month even though some have won it for cleaning out the employee fridges. I have received no thanks from Upper Management any of the Board of Operations or Board of Directors.

Recently the Director of my center took my ideas, my project and my work to a National Convention and presented it to hundreds of other 9-1-1 call centers claiming full credit for my work. I didn’t even get a footnote in his power-point and documentation he literally stole from me.
I have been contacted by dozens of other centers for the how what’s and whys. I am working on documentations and a blog post about this journey and how I did the impossible task.

While it may seem like I am bitter… I am not. I shared this struggle with you to help you and others see the problem within our current government systems. I know that I did the best I could to make government faster and more efficient at an extremely low cost. I know for a fact other local agencies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for systems that don’t work as well. I credit my boss for helping me be a success in spite of the odds. I would say that my organization is one of the better Salt Lake Valley government agencies.

Most in my agency don’t think about making it easier for the public to use or even that a dollar saved is a dollar we can spend doing something else that may be more important. Or even that the dollar is someone’s hard earned money.

There are some incredible people in government but there are even more who are less than desirable.

I find that government is trapped by rules and regulations that are inflexible and stifle creative problem solving. There are also large businesses who are too tightly embedded with contracts that make competition for services, parts and labor impossible without legislative change.

My career in the Public sector will end on or about July 26, 2010 when my 401k is 100% vested. And I can return to where the normal world is a world chasing better, faster and cheaper, the greatness of the free market.

And to those who think government benefits are better… its a bunch of bull…. I have worse benefits now than any where I have worked.