Virginia governor calls for IT outage review on Northrop Grumman's tab

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said Thursday the state will order an independent review of its information technology outage that stretched on for a week and shelved key agencies. Northrop Grumman, the state's IT vendor, will pay for the report.

The news comes Virginia's systems are back up and running after a week-long outage. For instance, Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles is able to issue licenses now. The outage was pinned on an EMC storage area network failure. Also:

• Virginia's IT outage doesn't pass management sniff test
• Virginia IT woes drag on; Northrop Grumman grateful for the patience

McDonnell said that the legislative audit and review committee and his administration will pick an independent third party to review the state's IT fiasco. He added that the review will be designed to figure out exactly what happened .

In a statement, McDonnell added:

I have spoken personally with Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush. I expressed to him that extended lapses in state computer services was an unacceptable hardship on our citizens and employees...This recent computer failure is unacceptable. I look forward to learning exactly how this occurred, how we can prevent such a disruption in the future, and how we can improve responsiveness and data reclamation if future interruptions occur.

Northrop Grumman said it supported the independent review in a statement.

We are diligently working through the lessons learned from this unfortunate incident and revising the plan to improve process and response time for restoring agency operations. We look forward to hearing the results of the independent review.

The company added that it was committed to the IT partnership with Virginia.

Virginia set a bold course when it embarked on this first-of-its-kind project. The partnership has experienced its share of obstacles, not unusual with large transformation programs, but with this modernized system Virginia and her citizens should find themselves years ahead of other states with the service provided by its IT infrastructure.

Bush said Tuesday at a Morgan Stanley investment conference that Northrop Grumman has been moving away from state and local IT work. Bush said:

If you look at our Information Systems business, we organized by defense, intelligence and then civil. And civil has encompassed both the Federal civil, as well as historically state and local. We made a decision, it's almost two years ago now, to tune down our state and local engagement, which essentially meant we were not interested in taking on additional state and local IT outsourcing work, we have not found that to be a particularly attractive line of business and so we have been shrinking intentionally our engagement across that part of the civil landscape. The federal part of that though continues to be a healthy business.