Is this the same agency that not so long ago had their computer systems simply "down"... for a week or so. It was some form of immigration or Visa granting agency.
A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The MBA (who has no other expertise) is capitalism's answer to the Soviet "apparatchik." I'm an MBA. Are you suggesting that I have no other expertise? Do you think that we undergo some sort of specialised lobotomy at business school to remove the knowledge and experience we accumulated before enroling in business school, and to prevent us from learning anything thereafter?
I think you slightly misread what I meant. I was referring to those who only get an MBA and then think they can manage anything even if they have no other expertise. Maybe your mileage has varied, but I've never seen anything but disasters in the real world when that happens. You can't manage something you don't understand.
By placing "who has no other expertise" in paranthese, it reads like a general assertion about "the MBA", rather than a qualifier intended to indicate that it is referring to a subset of MBAs.
I'll allow it this time. But I'm keeping my eye on you. ;-)
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#53I spoke with some USDS/18F folks a few months back, and I know they're working with USCIS to try and remedy the failures of contracting this all out to IBM. I'm hopeful things will get better in the next few years.
Indeed we are. Here are the latest updates on our work. https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/08/reimagining-the-immigration-p... https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/21/new-citizenship-resources/ And we've got a lot more features to come. *I work at 18F.
Creating USDS/18F may be one of the most under appreciated, impactful changes of the Obama administration in the years and decades to come. Keep up the good work!
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#54I find a major problem in very large organizations is the centralization of processes when there is ample budget to establish competing organizations. For example, clouds and datacenters in large orgs should have three different groups offering competing solutions. If one (inevitably) underperforms, then it gets axed and a new datacenter option is bootstrapped.
There are three main categories for the underperforming group's failure:
1. Structural organization issues: for example, the clients of the underperforming datacenter group play political games that undermine the datacenter group and prevent it from performing well
2. Poor management within the datacenter group itself: for example, employees forced to attend lengthy, unproductive meetings
3. Performance issues with the actual rank-and-file employees
So when you decide to 'axe' the underperforming org, what does that entail?
You could redistribute everyone, but if the error is category #2 or #3, then you saddle the higher performance groups with the causes of the problem. But if you fire everyone and the problem category #1, now you have to hire a bunch of new people and they are still doomed to failure.
How do you solve the problem where the organization needs to be self-aware enough to figure out if it has a category 1, 2 or 3 dysfunction?
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#55The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. Large corporations routinely spend gazillions on software projects that end up working poorly or not at all. Everyone who has worked in Corporate America knows this all too well. The root problem is not bureaucracy either. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have fairly large bureaucracies yet they routinely successfully comple…
Having worked in large companies, small startups, and government, government is orders of magnitude the worst offender when it comes to simply wasting money and getting nothing done. The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. In the worst cases for companies, money stops coming in the door and cuts are forced. Contrast the above with t…
On the upside when a gov project works they are often willing to keep it for a very long time and killing a project does not mean the original need is not still there. So, often really old government boondoggles are often 2 or 3 separate projects which keep the name after the first one fails.
> cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else
Plenty of people leave the US every year. It's generally really easy to do. At a local level choosing a city or state based on tax rate is even easer.
ED: Unless you meant the moving was the hard part, which seems reasonable.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#56"But only a fraction of applicants ever used that form before the agency took it offline, after officials decided to abandon the initial technology and development method and move toward a cloud-based system"
When government agencies like this talk about a "cloud-based system", what do they actually mean?
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I filed: * A permanent residency application based on my marriage. * An application to remove conditions on said permanent residency * An expedited naturalization application We didn't bother getting a lawyer: the paperwork was easy. The problem isn't that the paperwork is hard. The problem is that there is so much paperwork to file.
I think you're overstating it slightly. "Easy" is not the word I'd choose to use. I too decided not to get a lawyer. It went fine. But it was not "easy" it was long, painful, and trivial to make an error (the paperwork is extremely poorly designed, we used online guides instead of the official instructions to avoid tons of gotchas, in particular with the financials). People just need to be extremely careful without a…
True. It is definitely not easy. Another problem is the waiting periods these days is frustratingly long - so if you made a small mistake then it adds anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to remedy it, to an already lengthy process. This is why most people hire attorneys. The ironic thing is that attorneys make mistakes too - happened to me and a handful of people I know.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#58The most important point:
> the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM
So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen.
I keep hearing people talk about government inefficiency as though it were actual government employees who were failing. But it's usually like this: a failure of the bidding process and of accountability, where a large corporation (it's always one of the same few) collects money for a job and doesn't do it.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#59I went through the green card process last year. From my experience, it is nearly impossible without a lawyer. I wonder how much of the delay can be attributed to lobbying from the immigration lawyers that profit from the complicated, paper based process.
I went through it 8 years ago (via a K-1 and then as part of the permanent resident process) and didn't find it that onerous. There was a lot of repetition and some hassle with having to travel to another city for an interview and waiting for an employment authorisation document, but at no point did we consider involving a lawyer. I suspect the type of visa and country of origin make a huge difference.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked in large companies, small startups, and government, government is orders of magnitude the worst offender when it comes to simply wasting money and getting nothing done. The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. In the worst cases for companies, money stops coming in the door and cuts are forced. Contrast the above with t…
I've done corporate, startup, government (higher ed). Another difference with government is the intractable complexity. This plays to the difference between digitization and automation. Automation is the removal of human judgement. It requires simplification of the rules and processes. My local government revamped their payroll system. The first effort tried to digitize existing rules, and failed utterly. The second…
> preserving paper-based processes over 100 years old. Such fun
This is probably the most important part - every digitization effort I've seen fail, failed because they tried to digitize the existing process, rather than look at what information needed to be collected and creating a new digital process to collect that information.