July 26, 2007—The public-relations official from Dell clearly was not pleased. His company had only recently landed a multimillion-dollar, three-year contract to lease several thousand desktop computers to the Lake County Schools in Florida, and suddenly the news coverage was anything but uplifting, at least from Dell's perspective. "$3M Dell contract doesn't compute," read the snappy headline in the July 11 edition of the Orlando Sentinel, which went on to report that county school board members were "seething" over a claim that "the deal nearly stuck the district with 5,400 incompatible machines." The article was published on the internet, and a summary and link to the Sentinel story appeared briefly as an "Around The Web" item at eSchool News Online.
There was a big problem with the article, according to Dean Kline, the Dell spokesman. He says it wasn't accurate, fair, or balanced. Instead, he maintains, the Sentinel's account was an outgrowth of some "mudslinging" by HP, which had just lost out to Dell after having been the school district's primary computer vendor for the previous six years.
The newspaper quoted an HP district manager, Tony Cossio, as having told a school board meeting earlier that week that his company had not been allowed to submit a bid for computers with a less-expensive Windows operating system like one that Dell had priced, and that the school district's contract had been awarded without sealed bids.
Assertions like those, however, while seemingly accurate as far as they go, may not adequately explain all the ins and outs of a competitive process such as the one that occurred in Lake County, and the statements may thus be misleading or subject to misinterpretation. That's the opinion, in fact, of Lake County school officials, who are preparing for an audit of the process in the next few weeks as a result of a school board decision that preceded the Sentinel article.
According to the Sentinel, Cossio said the school district's handling of the process amounted to "a very cute way of making sure one vendor was put in a more favorable light over another vendor."
Ken Osman III, the district's chief technology officer, has a contrary view. "The bottom line," he says, "is that the [Sentinel] article gave the impression that we procured a bunch of computers on a lease that were not going to be usable on our network, and that is absolutely not true. And that we did so knowingly. And neither thing is true."
Osman adds: "The computers are all usable on the network, they're all ready to go, and they're all duly licensed to do so. And we always had a plan to make them viable."
