The work was to be done by July of this year, and a corrective action plan was filed in August promising to finish by June 2010, but it leaves out four agencies. As of September, 32 of 59 projects were completed. The report says the delays happened because “agency needs have not been fully addressed or fully understood.”

“[The] largest single reason for delay appears to be inadequate planning by [Northrop Grumman],” the report says, and it didn’t perform adequate due diligence. Virginia’s VITA [Virginia Information Technologies Agency] also bears blame for delay because it didn’t fully understand agency needs and that Northrop Grumman wasn’t meeting them.

VITA was formed in 2002 to centralize state IT, improve services and reduce cost by $100 million per year. The following year the state created the Information Technology Investment Board (ITIB) to oversee VITA. ITIB hired a CIO who administers VITA.VITA signs contracts and oversees projects, but it is overseen by ITIB, which falls under the governor on the organizational chart, but the governor lacks the statutory authority to jump into the contract dispute over the massive IT project, the report says.

The JLARC report says the network and services provided under the contract don’t meet the needs of some agencies, and there is no catalog of services the network offers to agencies or their price. VITA is supposed to define the network requirements and Northrop Grumman is supposed to recommend services that comply. The two parties disagree on which should identify unmet agency needs.

The report states that the responsibility is shared by VITA and Northrop Grumman, but the report finds that Northrop Grumman is responsible for the delays because its due diligence was inadequate.