Technology Partners Responds to Nov. 13 Statements in Local Publication
St. Louis, November 13, 2019
On November 13, a significant, local publication published an article about our work over the past two years with St. Louis County government. In this article the new County Director of Information Technology claimed that St. Louis County had wasted about $1M on technology contracts. The implication from the way the article was written was that our company is the vendor responsible for this “waste.” This article includes quite a few misstatements and accusations against our company that are not supported by facts. We would like to set the record straight regarding our engagements with St. Louis County.
First, the article misstates what we were paid and does not mention it was for not one, but two separate applications in addition to one video project and one staff augmentation assignment for a resource the County managed. So, instead of being paid “$700,000 to $800,000” for application development as the article suggests, we were paid a total of $548,000 ($473,500 for project work, $2,000 for video work and $72,500 for staff augmentation).
Secondly, the article quotes the new County Director of IT, Charles Henderson, in a way that implies that our company used some obscure programming language to develop these applications and that his team must now reverse engineer that code. This is categorically untrue, as our company and the County jointly agreed to using Microsoft’s flagship programming language C#. Fifty percent of the code was written by the County’s development team and ALL of the code (including ours) was maintained under tight version control by the County. Not only did the County have access to all of the code, but we also ensured the County was able to build and deploy both Gateway 311 and the Permitting Portal applications after final delivery. After completing everything we thought they would need moving forward, we directly asked Mr. Henderson in an email, “is this sufficient for your needs.” Henderson’s only response was, “Thank you!”
Thirdly, by taking Councilman Ernie Trakas’ comment out of context, the article implied our company was hired to develop the County’s website which Mr. Trakas described as “something from the end of the 20th century.” Though we’re unsure who developed the County’s website, we want to reiterate it was not us. We repeat: our company was not asked to develop or update the County’s website.
While it is disappointing that we were the recipient of some inaccurate reporting, we prefer not to dwell on it, knowing it regrettably happens to people all the time.
Instead, we want to spend some time thinking of what we’re grateful for, which includes our amazing team and our loyal customers. Today we received official word that we earned a Technology Partners all-time high Net Promoter Score, a customer satisfaction benchmark, of 80 percent by our clients, meaning they’re highly likely to recommend us to a friend. Anything over 70 percent is considered world-class. For comparison, Apple’s rating in 2018 was 63 percent.
We have and will continue to bring positive change and media coverage for St. Louis’, IT community as we have for the last 25 years.
We have learned that we should try and find good in every situation. This situation gives us the chance to once again publicly thank our team for their outstanding integrity and professionalism and our customers who have expressed their appreciation for the services our company provides.
Lisa Nichols, CEO
