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> When it was awarded in 2012, the RTLS contract represented an opportunity for the VA to shed its reputation as an old-school tech dinosaur and chart a path to

> When it was awarded in 2012, the RTLS contract represented an opportunity for the VA to shed its reputation as an old-school tech dinosaur and chart a path toward what leaders were calling a “transformation initiative.” That sounds a lot like a mid-life crisis.

nikanj 9y ago
That sounds a lot like ”I need a gold star in my CV to boost my career”
Spooky23 9y ago
Transformation was a $500 word that McKinsey folks and their ilk throw down. It amusing, as the McKinsey people will tell you that 70% of these things fail, but you will succeed, because this time, <reasons>. They usually deploy this stuff to enable centralization of large organizations with broad geographic or functional scope. These things always fail, because you cannot achieve cost savings and remotely manage the broad scope effectively. An example of this is the ridiculous project fractured here. Tracking crap with WiFi is what happens when some CIO in HQ “solves” a problem on the hospital floor.
devonkim 9y ago
This is usually synonymous with “devops” transformations as part of huge personnel problems (read: no young people want to join / stay) in most large, old companies that are facing a form of a late-life crisis that was plainly visible decades ago to anyone but the willfully blind. The standard situation of the usual F500 and government technology stack is a Petri dish of half-finished projects by an army of consultants maybe a couple years out of school charged at $300 / hr to the customer and everything is solved by throwing bodies at problems when a square peg was sold for a non-Euclidean hole because the decision-makers are so directly inexperienced in how technology works that 25-year old tech sounds like it’s cutting edge on a marketecture deck (or presume that something written recently couldn’t possibly be archaic already). It’s a lot like failed relationships with dozens of illegitimate children that you’re paying child support on.

nikanj 9y ago

That sounds a lot like ”I need a gold star in my CV to boost my career”

Spooky23 9y ago

Transformation was a $500 word that McKinsey folks and their ilk throw down. It amusing, as the McKinsey people will tell you that 70% of these things fail, but you will succeed, because this time, <reasons>. They usually deploy this stuff to enable centralization of large organizations with broad geographic or functional scope. These things always fail, because you cannot achieve cost savings and remotely manage the broad scope effectively. An example of this is the ridiculous project fractured here. Tracking crap with WiFi is what happens when some CIO in HQ “solves” a problem on the hospital floor.

devonkim 9y ago

This is usually synonymous with “devops” transformations as part of huge personnel problems (read: no young people want to join / stay) in most large, old companies that are facing a form of a late-life crisis that was plainly visible decades ago to anyone but the willfully blind. The standard situation of the usual F500 and government technology stack is a Petri dish of half-finished projects by an army of consultants maybe a couple years out of school charged at $300 / hr to the customer and everything is solved by throwing bodies at problems when a square peg was sold for a non-Euclidean hole because the decision-makers are so directly inexperienced in how technology works that 25-year old tech sounds like it’s cutting edge on a marketecture deck (or presume that something written recently couldn’t possibly be archaic already). It’s a lot like failed relationships with dozens of illegitimate children that you’re paying child support on.