A Deficit of Information
The Washington Post today reports on how several states, including Tennessee, are using sophisticated new software to better manage bureaucratic spending.

States are facing their worst deficits in 50 years, so some - including Oregon, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Utah and Mississippi - are turning to sophisticated software tools to shave costs and stretch revenue. The data-retrieval systems are particularly valuable now, state officials said, because they can exhume critical information about expenses that were previously buried in a mountain of raw figures.

Actually, Tennessee is not facing its worst deficit in 50 years. It finished the last fiscal year with a revenue surplus.

The companies that make this software, facing stalled corporate spending, are showering attention on the civil servants they once thought of as small fry. Major companies that design this type of software, such as Business Objects and Brio Software, both headquartered in Silicon Valley, and McLean-based MicroStrategy Inc., say state and local governments have become more interested in their products in the past two years. The software typically costs several hundred thousand dollars for a state government, software executives said, but once installation and training costs are tallied it is not unusual for the system's final cost to be several million dollars. ... The software's proficiency at compressing immense volumes of data into neat streams of information can be as useful for states as it is for a chain with thousands of stores, the software companies say.

Information is nice, but unless this new software is used to root out waste and make government more efficient and less costly, it's just a neat tech gizmo that cost taxpayers a lot of money.

Richard Taylor, Tennessee's project manager for the financial-data access system, estimates the $1 million the state spent on MicroStrategy's software will save $500,000 per year even if the software only halves the man-hours employees spend gathering and analyzing data from a mainframe computer. When Tennessee finishes installing the software, it will give employees access to all the financial transactions the state has completed in the past five years.

Okay, good. But the people of Tennessee should also be given access to the data, via a publicly accessible website. It is the people of Tennessee, after all, who pay the taxes that the government spends. So why won't the bureaucracy let the bill-payers see how their money is spent? I suspect it's because giving the people access to information about of the financial transactions their state government makes would provide the people detailed knowledge of just how much money is being spent frivolously.