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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#31

Post by meepmorp »

mrdodge wrote: post #12
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

He hired Microsoft and what sounds like a Microsoft Partner. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

I meant the guys who he hired to take care of this stuff.

Of course, after Tuesday, they're all looking for work now.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#32

Post by SkyMarshal »

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal,* etc...*

This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup the GOP's centralized GOTV operation?

They could point LOIC at the IP receiving all the real-time field reports, set up hidden wireless jammers around Boston Garden, and any number of other hacks and exploits to disrupt this centralized system.

I use the GOP and Anonymous as an example here, but it could work in any direction. It's one thing for a campaign to lose due to its own incompetence and negligence, but quite another to lose due to outside interference and being the target of cyberwarefare.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#33

Post by meepmorp »

DanBC wrote: post #30
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

> Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things. Wait, what? There's a difference between people taking responsibility for what their staff do (thus, he should take responsibility for it) and people actually being responsible for what their staff do - especially if those staff are not staff but sub-contracted service providers.

If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#34

Post by nhangen »

Coming from a launch that had its own share of issues, I can say that things like these happen for a variety of reasons:

1. Developers overestimate their capabilities 2. Developers underestimate timelines

3. Client overestimates developer throughput 4. Client underestimates man hours required for any given feature.

5. Someone expects someone else to do QA. 6. Project manager assigns everything an ASAP priority

And this is just to start.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#35

Post by lifeguard »

niels_olson wrote: post #28
jvehent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

SharePoint. Oh my head. When I saw us using that in the future ops center for Fukushima, it was the same feeling I had when I came back from sea duty and there was this thing called PowerPoint: I felt like they were asking me to put my brain in egg slicer. Giving a bunch of Marines with history degrees network and expecting them to understand version control is a step to far. Maybe in ten years. But the interface is…

And then a 18 yo REMF downloads all your secret classified documents and uploads them to the Internet.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#36

Post by jfc »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #27

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1... I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

Except that there are several reasons Romney lost. The system crash may be one contributing factor, but it is far from the only reason his campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#37

Post by incision »

smacktoward wrote: post #3

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson... To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech…

>This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech vendors for the actual implementation. The consultants and vendors then either proceed to wander in the weeds expensively due to lack of direction, or actively seize on the client's ignorance and take them for a ride.

In my experience, this is 100% correct.

At least this mess has been exposed to some degree. There's something of a saying around these kind of projects to the effect of "This project -WILL- succeed".

The subtext being that that no matter what the facts are, the project will be promoted publicly as a success.

It's incredibly disheartening to see an abortive mess transformed into a sparkling success via fake dashboards, paid press and the like.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#38

Post by lifeguard »

atomical wrote: post #17
lifeguard wrote: post #5

The campaign could not manage launching a web app and they wanted to run the entire USA !?!?!?!

Yes, people who make mistakes can still run the entire USA. It has been done before.

This kind of false equivocation is dishonest and intellectually lazy.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#39

Post by ams6110 »

lifeguard wrote: post #23
WrkInProgress wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you determine using Windows was a mistake from the information presented in the article ?

A: ungraceful crash under load

Sorry, a database-backed web app works just fine on a Microsoft stack, there are thousands of them out there and I say that as someone who vastly prefers unix but this is clearly a project management fiasco and architecture design fiasco, not a technology stack fundamentally unable to handle the demands.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#40

Post by aneth4 »

smacktoward wrote: post #3

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson... To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech…

Indeed. Particularly in contract to the Obama machine, which was built by passionate technologies motivated mostly to help Obama win, not make money.
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