Morano questions independent verification of Motorola's root cause analysis
Morano asks who independently verifies Motorola's account, noting Motorola performed the change, diagnosed the problem, helped restore service, and is now analyzing the root cause of its own failure. He asks if any outside technical expert, comptroller, or inspector general is reviewing the evidence. Gelobter says she is personally overseeing it and they need to ensure Motorola delivers to required standards.
All right, no more questions.
But yeah, I just want to say, yeah, we have a lot of work to do on this issue, including and especially on basic things, including notifying the public.
Again, people, when they have an emergency, when they're facing a fire or could potentially become the victim of an assault or any other crime, we tell them to call 911.
Every second counts, as we all know, and them not knowing, not being notified, or us not even making a good faith effort to notify people about an outage in the 911 system, that is just alarming, it's disturbing, and
not a good example of good government.
And also, so look forward to working on the notification part.
And also, just got to say, I know we've done a lot, and I know this is on all of us as a city, but the fact that we wouldn't even be able to tell whether calls are getting transferred to the Brooklyn Center or the Bronx Center is out.
And also, it seems like we don't even know whether there's an outage or not.
It seems like we're just dealing with a really hot mess, which we have to give a lot of attention to.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Chair.
Councilmember Morano, followed by Wong.
Thank you, Chair.
Commissioner, thank you for being so diligent with your answers.
And I know this has gone on a while, but obviously it's an important issue.
I want to focus on something a little different.
We've talked about what Motorola did.
What I'd like to understand is who independently verifies Motorola's account of what happened?
Motorola is a major contractor on this system.
Motorola performed the software change.
They participated in diagnosing the problem.
They helped restore the service.
Is Motorola also participating in determining the root cause of the failure associated with its own change?
And if so, who is independently validating that conclusion for the city?
Is there some sort of outside technical expert, the controller or an inspector general, cyber command, really anybody without a financial relationship with Motorola reviewing the underlying evidence?
Thank you for the question.
Motorola is performing their own internal analysis as we speak.
in terms of validating and vetting that,
The answer I want to give is me.
At this point, right, trying to figure out what happened and how we prevent it from happening again, especially given that they are such a major vendor and provider of service for us,
is something that we need to take a closer look at and really understand.
If they are going to be a managed service provider, they need to make sure that they are delivering to the standards that are required.
Right, particularly when the city's gone from paying them 20-some-odd million dollars to around $80 million.
They're benefiting from New York City taxpayers.
I would think when a contractor may have caused a failure involving 911, the contractor can't be the only one grading its own homework.
And I guess my broader question, and this is particularly relevant a couple of days before the anniversary of September 11th, where so much was written about and discussed regarding the radios that the firefighters were using.
How dependent is the city on Motorola right now?