Demzilla

The DNC is currently trying to roll out Demzilla, a piece of software that will collect state and interest group voter lists into a single 150 million-member database that can be used for fundraising efforts. The project, run by QRS New Media and based on software from Plus Three, Alterian and Market Zone, is failing, according to Roll Call, for all of the usual reasons: overengineering, bad or incomplete data, and a lamentable lack of involvement from the intended users during development. The result is that some searches now take weeks to complete. This is, of course, absurd, and Demzilla is basically unusable at this stage — just when the DNC needs it for the 2004 elections. We could write a book about software development disasters like this, but it would be boring — these are all rookie mistakes. The real story, though, is not that the DNC can’t deploy a by-the-book piece of software. That’s only embarrassing.

What should really concern Democrats is that the National Committee could not muster support for the Demzilla project from groups that are ostensibly their closest allies. The DNC claims that 40 state committees will participate, but the reception has been lukewarm to hostile. This could be explained, in part, by the interest groups’ and state committees’ reluctance to share their voter lists with the national committee. The DNC is asking for their bread and butter, so this is probably the case. Surely they could have been made to see the benefits of a single, unified collection of this information? Couldn’t the DNC have used a trusted third party to broker the information? Was their no middle ground? Did the DNC really sink millions of dollars into this project and expect the states to participate under duress? Exactly how well-managed is the DNC?