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SAMS is not working as well as the system it replaced, but it’s no longer a maelstrom of emergency updates handled by freaked-out staff. “The way it worked yesterday is how it’s going to work today,” he said. “So there’s a least a degree of stability.”

But it’s still inefficient at basic tasks like changing the address on a welfare recipient’s file, which drives workers nuts. In his last written status update to city council, Burry pointed out another problem: it takes a “team lead” to transfer a welfare recipient’s file from one case worker to another. A clerk used to do that. So they’ve named a bunch of team leads.

It’s not exactly efficient, and it’s representative of weaknesses that have city staff wrestling with their computers rather than helping people. The problem is “primarily having enough time with the client to focus on their needs and talk about what they should be doing next,” Burry said.

Social workers want to understand what welfare recipients’ lives are like and help them find programs and assistance that will help them provide for themselves, he said. With SAMS’s shortcomings, they can’t.

“You come in, you studied for years how to work with people, and now you’re a key-punch operator,” he said.

Burry believes the government is serious about fixing the system but he’s not observed a lot of progress so far. “I need to see that these things they’re talking about are actually going to happen,” he said. One challenge Burry sees is that SAMS is based on an off-the-shelf program from IBM; repairs the ministry makes could break any time the underlying software is updated.

His department estimates it’ll cost about $1.5 million extra for Ottawa alone to deal with SAMS this year, and the province has only promised to cover a third of that so far.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

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