Innovative Kansas Department of Labor Site Paves Way for Web 3.0

January 1, 2009 Russell Ball 11 comments

Kansas residents who try to file unemployment claims online after normal business are greeted with the following message.

Is the Kansas Department of Labor blazing new trails when it comes to e-commerce by becoming the first ever 12/5 service on the internets?

Could it be that they forging ahead with a more humane working environment for servers than those infamous 24/7 data center sweatshops?

Some rather short-sighted people that I have shared this information with have taken a more cynical view of the situation.

One friend suggested that perhaps the developers had a nightly mainframe batch processing to contend with and simply weren’t smart enough to figure out a way to save requests in a queue for processing the next day.

Someone else thought that perhaps the developers were a little too literal when they tried to translate the manual processes into working software.

It was even suggested that bureaucrats might have been to blame with a dogmatically simplistic interpretation of regulations governing application timelines.

As for me, I believe it is wrong to view this simply as one of the greatest WTF finds ever.

Instead I see it as some of the most innovative thinking about the web medium since Al Gore first invented the internets.

Startups and VC’s of the world take notice!

I have seen the future and Web 3.0 is 12/5 all the way.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Humor none

#1 | Written by Dewayne Christensen about 3 years ago.

This is also the same organization whose phone system answers with “to avoid keeping you on hold for long times, we’re hanging up on you. Bye!”

Any particular reason you’re hanging out on the unemployment site?
#2 | Written by Russell Ball about 3 years ago.

That’s what I’m talking about. Innovation through and through…

My job seems safe at the moment, but the spousal unit was recently laid off.
#3 | Written by Jason about 3 years ago.

Perhaps they just don’t want to play their staff for 24/7 support and help mitigate the risk by turning off the systems. Maybe their IT staff is the happiest IT staff in the world.
#4 | Written by Jason about 3 years ago.

Oops, “play” should be “pay”
#5 | Written by Karl Katzke about 3 years ago.

Great find! As a gub’mnt IT worker myself, I’ve seen some amazing examples of stupidity and politically motivated shenanigans that look like they’d result in this.

My guess is that the application kept crashing during off hours, and the IT guy that runs the server is probably paid about $25,000 a year (because that’s all that’s been budgeted since he was hired in 1993.) In a meeting, the director in charge said she wanted the app running 24×7. The IT guy countered with “I’m not paid enough for that.” The IT guy’s manager and the manager in charge of the program probably “met in the middle” and agreed that the IT guy would guarantee that the app would run during business hours, but during off hours it would be “off”.
#6 | Written by Russell Ball about 3 years ago.

@Jason – Since they wouldn’t be losing any money or customers if they had periodic downtime during off hours, it seems like they could allow data entry at night while having their IT staff simply wait until the next morning to handle any problems that arise during that time.

I could tolerate a ‘sorry, experiencing temporary problems’ page a couple times a month much better than I could handle a page telling me to come back during office hours.

If anything, it would make life easier on their IT staff to move to a 24/7 schedule because it would even out the activity and decrease the amount of stress on their servers. This would probably greatly decrease the number of firefighting episodes their staff had to deal with during the day because of the servers being under too much load.

In fact, moving to a 24/7 model would probably even save them lots of money in the long run because they wouldn’t have to invest as much on infrastructure to handle the load spikes during the day.

This approach just seems ridiculous from any angle I look at it.
#7 | Written by Russell Ball about 3 years ago.

@Karl – Good point. If I were only making $25k a year, then I would probably be trying to supplement my income by running some porn or internet gaming service from their servers at night. That would certainly explain why they are unavailable at night.
#8 | Written by Kyralessa about 3 years ago.

Perhaps they figure that if you enter your claim during working hours, you’re less likely to be faking it?

Maybe the “web app” is a big facade; you enter your data, and a little old lady on the other side gets a printout and types it into a greenscreen app. But she only works from 7a-7p.
#9 | Written by Russell Ball about 3 years ago.

@Kyralessa – So far your theory about the little old lady is the best fit.

However, for things to fully fall into place, the site would have to be hosted on her computer and she would have to shut it down before she left each day.

I definitely feel as though we are making progress in solving this mystery.
#10 | Written by Donald Belcham about 3 years ago.

I once worked on a system which had a Service Agreement that required 11.5/5 @ 98% up time. It was a hard goal to program for, but we managed to get around it. The whole reason for the 22.5 hrs/day and weekend downtime was that the mainframe database services were perceived to be off line during their backups and batch routines. This was proven to be only for writes to the database and since our system predominately read data, we were able to far exceed those availability hours.
#11 | Written by Russell Ball about 3 years ago.

@Donald – Even if all of the processing for this site occurs on a mainframe that is unavailable at certain times due to backups, processing that has sequential dependencies, etc., they should still be able to store application requests in a staging database that can then later be fed into their primary system.

I doubt their website has a direct connection to the mainframe anyways. Most of the systems I’ve seen that include mainframes have RDBMS staging databases that are the immediate backends for web sites. The data is then transfered back and forth from the mainframe via feed files (simple text files) on a scheduled basis.

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Innovative Kansas Department of Labor Site Paves Way for Web 3.0

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