The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#2Looks like the saying that nobody gets fired for buying IBM is still valid.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#3Here's something fun to digest.
> “While our acquisition system is very complex, it is document based. . .It’s unreasonable to expect that a single individual or even a group of individuals to be able to fully understand all of the relevant documents to answer a specific question.”
Total pages: 1,897 pages
Total pages in tax code: 16,845 pages
Total pages in Obamacare: 11,000 pages
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#4My understanding is procurement is and remains broken because there are entrenched powers who benefit greatly from that situation. It is working as designed by the people who wrote the rules, bringing great profit to the intended recipients. No change of the system will be allowed that threatens this property.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#5Machines making decisions due to our own man made complexity, wonder when this will become the norm for all facets of government, until the machines create their own massive complexity making it even more difficult for humans thus we end up completely relying on them.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#6My understanding is procurement is and remains broken because there are entrenched powers who benefit greatly from that situation. It is working as designed by the people who wrote the rules, bringing great profit to the intended recipients. No change of the system will be allowed that threatens this property.
Could you elaborate on who benefits from a poor procurement system? Does it benefit them in that in conforms to their ideology, or does it do so tangibly? I'm familiar with people being in favor of government being cumbersome, but I can't picture how someone within government who has the power to effect this change would support this.
Edit: 'this' in the last sentence ambiguously refers to the nauseatingly lengthy and tedious process currently in place.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#7Machines making decisions due to our own man made complexity, wonder when this will become the norm for all facets of government, until the machines create their own massive complexity making it even more difficult for humans thus we end up completely relying on them.
It's interesting, or perhaps sad, how ripe for abuse this is. Funnel billions of dollars into a black box that then results in some amount of "stuff" being delivered to various places. The fact that they are using a system so complex that humans can't individually understand it means there's not really any accountability.
Maybe a few years from now, we'll be seeing the developers working on Watson deciding to retire to private islands at the age of 40.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#8My understanding is procurement is and remains broken because there are entrenched powers who benefit greatly from that situation. It is working as designed by the people who wrote the rules, bringing great profit to the intended recipients. No change of the system will be allowed that threatens this property.
Could you elaborate on who benefits from a poor procurement system? Does it benefit them in that in conforms to their ideology, or does it do so tangibly? I'm familiar with people being in favor of government being cumbersome, but I can't picture how someone within government who has the power to effect this change would support this. Edit: 'this' in the last sentence ambiguously refers to the nauseatingly lengthy an…
Support the change, retire from government, get a cushy job on the board of some defense contractor.
Edit:
To support what I say check out Raytheon's board of directors[1], maybe a third of them retired from the military, worked from the DoD, and one guy was the principal White House foreign policy advisor to President George W. Bush.
[1]http://investor.raytheon.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=84193&p=irol-go...
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#9Machines making decisions due to our own man made complexity, wonder when this will become the norm for all facets of government, until the machines create their own massive complexity making it even more difficult for humans thus we end up completely relying on them.
We can only hope, at least those decision chains can be audited.
Re: The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson
#10Here's something fun to digest. > “While our acquisition system is very complex, it is document based. . .It’s unreasonable to expect that a single individual or even a group of individuals to be able to fully understand all of the relevant documents to answer a specific question.” Total pages: 1,897 pages Total pages in tax code: 16,845 pages Total pages in Obamacare: 11,000 pages
The key difference is that the tax code and the ACA cover very large surface areas of which only a subset applies to any one player. FAR is largely applicable to any vendor, regardless of contract size, and requires onerous documentation at every step.