This Is How They Do It: Harball Lobbying & Political Sleaze on Beacon Hill

As more details come out, Cognos, the IBM subsidiary that managed a over-priced contract with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts looks as bad as some of our state officials.

True, it doesn't necessarily take much to make our ethically-challenged House Speaker Sal DiMasi look bad or to make the first year or so of the Patrick Administration to look less than competent. What stands out, however, in the deal, is at least one government official who turned down the hard charging, possibly illegal lobbying by a hired representative of Cognos. And now, she's talking.

According to the Globe,

A former state Department of Education administrator has told investigators that she was offered a private sector job by a sales representative for Cognos ULC, around the same time that the software company was attempting to win a lucrative education contract in 2006, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Maureen Chew was the education department's chief information officer when, she told state officials, she was approached by Joseph Lally, a Cognos representative trying to broker a multimillion-dollar contract between Cognos and the state.

Lally was a former Cognos vice president who was selling the company's software through a new sales firm he had founded. Chew told officials he had offered her a job at his company, Montvale Solutions, during a lunch meeting, and that she declined it.

Chew refused to meet with Lally after the offer was made, but Lally went over her head to her superiors in a successful effort to land a multimillion-dollar software contract, according to the officials. He had unusual access to the Department of Education's headquarters in Malden, she told officials, appearing there multiple times, though she didn't know whom he was visiting.

If he made a job offer, Lally could have violated the state's conflict of interest law, which bars private individuals from offering anything to a public official with the intent to influence an official act.

The report of the job offer marks yet another instance of Cognos appearing in the thick of questionable activity in pursuit of state business. After Cognos won a $13 million contract to sell management performance software to the state in 2007, the state inspector general sharply criticized the deal, saying the bidding process was so rushed and faulty that the deal should be rescinded.

Neither Lally nor Chew, who now works for the information technology division of the Executive Office for Administration and Finance, returned phone calls from the Globe seeking comment. Last week Chew was interviewed by investigators from the inspector general's office.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored often, though, not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart. [Wikipedia]

Many people are familiar with spreadsheets and databases, software applications used to process and report data. The Massachusetts Department of Education was looking into Cognos software in order to manage aspects of educational accountability in the Commonwealth. Cognos offers business intelligence software for big systems. Its website describes the functions management software and services as follows:

• Calculate curriculum costs, identify good fundraising programs
• Monitor student headcount and performance, program outcomes, school reputation, national agendas, and other KPIs
• Share secure Web-based information with all stakeholders
• Manage endowments and recruitment through driver-based planning
• Spot high- and low-performance schools or programs
• Map enrollment to attendance and attendance to performance
• Speed compliance reporting

--Mb