Some license-plate stickers for my wife's car just got tossed away in the spring cleaning, as we had already put one set of stickers on the other set of plates the state had given us.
Kind of funny, right, getting two completely different sets of new license plates within a few days for the same car.
For many Minnesotans, like the service providers called deputy registrars, there was nothing funny about the kinds of problems in vehicle licensing that became widespread after the state cut over to a technology system called MNLARS.
Now a new report by an independent group suggests buying a whole new system and shutting down development of MNLARS, even though the system has cost well over $100 million. The recommendation makes a lot of sense, and Gov. Tim Walz had no practical choice when he decided to go along with it.
Lots of things went wrong to make it possible for two sets of plates to be sent for the same car. But on the basic decision of whether to build a system or try to buy one off the shelf, it probably was the right call to build one back when this whole thing started. But now buying seems like the right call.
It's important to understand that going with the buy option doesn't mean some sort of complete do-over. Buying or building can both lead to trouble if the data is a mess and the business processes haven't been ironed out. And that hard work seems to be done.
The new report came from a task force established by the Blue Ribbon Council on Information Technology, chaired by Rick King of Thomson Reuters. The council was established just this year and soon got handed the assignment to independently review MNLARS.
MNLARS had been in the works for a long time before going live for motor vehicles in summer 2017. It didn't start out as a complete do-it-yourself project, with Hewlett-Packard initially handed the assignment in early 2012 of developing the system. HP was sent packing eventually, and then the project moved in-house.