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The way government does tech is outdated and risky

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#41

Post by squidfood »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #39
squidfood wrote: post #17

Federal 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,…

Out of curiosity, why aren't you naming the no-support supplier? Are there any rules forbidding you to do so?

Honestly, tiny company, couple years ago, don't remember now, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a couple dudes who look at Fed announcements and say "hey, I can buy that off the shelf and ship it to the feds for a profit".

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#42

Post by anigbrowl »

bchjam wrote: post #2

Does anyone else find it ironic that Obama's campaign was a picture of web execution but in his administration it's the opposite?

Not really. The campaign is centered on a single objective, that of victory. the government tool has to be forward-compatible for decades to come, not to mention that it is subject to Congressional supervision and so on. If it was run like an agile development project then there'd be loud screams about the lack of accountability, process, etc. This is a 'big iron' project if ever I saw one.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#43

Post by sien »

It's not just the US government that has crazy, weird, inefficient technology. I'd be surprised if every government wasn't like this. The biggest IT failure in the world was the UK's attempt at healthcare computing that cost 12Bn GBP and didn't deliver a functioning system.

I work as a contractor for the Australian government. I personally know of multiple project failures in the 10s of millions of AUD range and a few in the hundreds of millions. These stories don't even make the news.

I've worked at small companies, research institutes, universities and now in government. I've not worked big corporate but have heard that it is similar, although more efficient than government. Size means you get less feedback on what is really useful.

Government fundamentally lacks feedback on what really matters. In the US the department of health cannot be driven out of business by another department that does what is important 10% better. In private industry that discipline and feedback makes things work.

If you build a widget X and it isn't something that people want you go under. That doesn't happen in government. If you build a donkey but it's the donkey they paid for it could be in service for 20 years.

It's hard to see how to make it all better. Perhaps trying to keep components small and having multiple groups build them and select the best might help. Then at least 2+ groups would have to compete to build a better system.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#44

Post by fpp »

Have a look at what's happening in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/transformation (fully responsive design pages together with new service backends delivered with Agile / Scrum)

and the teams doing it: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ (they are hiring more than a dozen people in the moment)

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#46

Post by 001sky »

crbnw00ts wrote: post #18

That 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 c…

"What often happens when you have these big requirements up front, is the people who are specifying the product are afraid of not getting all their ideas in, so they overscope the project. And then the development team is on the hook for delivering everything, not just the essential elements."

Isn't this the essence of the critique, though? Its not the lack of iteration, but the logic of the spec-formation.

To put this another way, you are right that it has nothing to do with the waterfall model per se. But it has everything to do with accepting the same set of behavioural assumptions. Namely, that the people who spec the model have perfect foresight regarding the spec itself.

What needs to be accepted is "incomplete spec". The problem with this is then the hold-up problem. you get held to ransom to fill in the incompletions. So what is really needed is a capability to execute this more in-house. This would prevent the re-negotiation of the economics (the hold up), because the project manager would just execute properly, directing resources (already paid for) through fiat rather by then re-negotiating vs a modified spec.

One problem with this is accountability. There would need to be more accountability, because execution of the incomplete spec will not be the same as farming responsibility for the spec out to a third party vendor.

Project managers need to get used to the idea of working intensely with a development team rather than asking for a specific thing and then walking away

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#48

Post by nostromo »

squidfood wrote: post #17

Federal 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,…

> 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

There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue.

With such a large organization, there are undoubtedly large swaths of both incompetence and competence.

The challenge with any large organization is that the rules are there to reign in the bad people, but are equally enforced on the good. (For example, most people won't abuse their company's T&E policy, but some will, so everyone has to be treated as suspect.)

Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#49

Post by coolrhymes »

ex-cgi contractor here and I am not surprised. they did the Massachusetts health care system that cost over millions of dollars and didn't deliver on the first day. The government had to shell out even more to keep it running bcoz Gov. Patrick didn't want that to fail on his watch.

The way they work is purely in water-fall project management mode. Project managers are gods and spend insane amount of time on ms-office calculating hours per each task that are 2 years out. then they bring CGI indian sub-par programmers on L1 to save on costs. Technology is least of their concerns since its about shipping code. Also blame shouldn't be just on CGI, the government is at fault as well. Simple request for information would take about 4 biz days to get it. everything is slow and the Gov IT staff has no clue on how to scale. Anyway, when I heard CGI won this project, I knew it would fail.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#50

Post by drblast »

sien wrote: post #43

It's not just the US government that has crazy, weird, inefficient technology. I'd be surprised if every government wasn't like this. The biggest IT failure in the world was the UK's attempt at healthcare computing that cost 12Bn GBP and didn't deliver a functioning system. I work as a contractor for the Australian government. I personally know of multiple project failures in the 10s of millions of AUD range and a fe…

I kind of like the idea of every government function has two independent providers that compete for funding, and citizens could choose which provider to use.

I'm sure that system would blow up in some other way, however.

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