the DoD does not know what it wants ahead of time; they are in a tight feedback loop with contractors.
The way government does tech is outdated and risky
11–20 of 145 posts
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#12This isn't going to change until there is a thought process shift for leaders on both the government and contractor side. I worked on a project that fought tooth and nail to create a project using an agile development process and it was one of the best projects I worked on for the government. It was killed due to politics, but the feedback, functionality, UX, and collaboration up to that point were great. Everything else I did was waterfall and we always has the same cycle.
while (true) {
// Contractor working for a year
Government: This isn't what we wanted!
Contractor: We met all of the requirements... See all of the boxes are checked.
Government: Well we want to change 1,2...n things.
Contractor: Okay, Let's do a follow on contract.
Government: Okay, Here is the money; Go.
}Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#13Does anyone else find it ironic that Obama's campaign was a picture of web execution but in his administration it's the opposite?
The health care site involves a web application with high number of business rules and data structures. The campaign's site is fluff.
The campaign's site was also static (see http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...)
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#14I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…
This is called "teaming", and it's a big game of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours in gov't contracting.
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#15I don't know why websites can't run on magic and fairies. The rest of the government does.
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#16Does anyone else find it ironic that Obama's campaign was a picture of web execution but in his administration it's the opposite?
The health care site involves a web application with high number of business rules and data structures. The campaign's site is fluff.
bchjam said "Obama campaign" while you dismiss just the static website. That wasn't where the impressive IT investment in the Obama campaign was directed. You underestimate the amount of technology used for canvasing, volunteer management, exit polling, etc.
"Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js."
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-te...
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#17Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse.
Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement.
Procurement put it out for bid, and a fly-by-night company undercut the bid by $10K... by noticing that procurement had not specified details of service level (that were in the bids we'd gotten and forwarded). Procurement, once it goes there, is a true black box. No communication, no understanding.
Five months later, we were basically delivered 2 pallets of unassembled parts and no instructions. Believe me, we spent 3-4x as much in labor as the $10K savings to get it working, and it's been plagued with issues that would have been under the onsite service warranties for the better companies.
The biggest irony is: I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent, so puts so many levels of "check" bureaucracy in place that the people who know what they want can't participate directly in getting it.
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#18That diagram for the "waterfall" approach that they yanked from Wikipedia is a complete straw-man representation. It's nonsense.
Here is the actual, original source for the Waterfall approach, first published in 1970:
http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/orig...
If people would just bother to scroll past the first couple of pages, they will notice that the approach already includes some iteration cycles between steps.
In other words, this whole "agile vs. waterfall" debate which has wasted countless hours of human effort is based on a complete misunderstanding of what "waterfall" is in the first place. No one ever seriously proposed a model without iteration. It simply never existed in the first place!
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#19Does anyone else find it ironic that Obama's campaign was a picture of web execution but in his administration it's the opposite?
There's a big difference in the amount of bureaucracy needed to organize thousands of volunteers doing one thing versus millions of employees doing an uncountable number of things.
Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky
#20Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…
Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence.
Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.