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In an analog world, the government used to think that pushing papers around was part of the job they had to do. But with the digitization of government bureaucr

In an analog world, the government used to think that pushing papers around was part of the job they had to do. But with the digitization of government bureaucracy the systems have been outsourced to private entities. The government no longer has the know-how to do its core business, only to operate the system handed to them by these private entities. Government agencies seem to think they are in control of the IT systems, as they have ordered them according to some specification they made up. They're doing the first step in a waterfall process of software development. But the waterfall process is not a good fit for software development. Sadly the people in charge has not yet learned that. The IT knowledge and systems development must be moved back in-house, into the government agencies. The government must start seeing software development as part of their core operations.

washadjeffmad 3y ago
You have no idea how often I have had to troll through boxes of printed documents exceeding the legal retention period because digital records, if they ever existed, were improperly tracked and filed. People, even the ones who live in IT, treat digital records as disposable because they can't see the costs or value associated with keeping the damn things organized beyond their managers' interest in them. Even with backups, I can go back years to find data that wasn't included because they weren't told it was important at the time. More than once, the only thing keeping everything from the fire is an unassuming person in the back who's been there 25 years and is the sole living record of that department's or division's history. And they absolutely remember every bonehead that told them to scrap or change a critical process, saved or printed and filed everything of importance, and have been waiting for years for someone to finally ask for it. Unrelated Edit: If you want something to be archived for eternity, include a recipe on it somewhere. I'm in the middle of scanning my grandmother's recipes, and the number of unrelated publications she kept from national, state, and local entities dating to the 1950s solely because they put some grandma-bait in them somewhere is astounding.

washadjeffmad 3y ago

You have no idea how often I have had to troll through boxes of printed documents exceeding the legal retention period because digital records, if they ever existed, were improperly tracked and filed. People, even the ones who live in IT, treat digital records as disposable because they can't see the costs or value associated with keeping the damn things organized beyond their managers' interest in them. Even with backups, I can go back years to find data that wasn't included because they weren't told it was important at the time. More than once, the only thing keeping everything from the fire is an unassuming person in the back who's been there 25 years and is the sole living record of that department's or division's history. And they absolutely remember every bonehead that told them to scrap or change a critical process, saved or printed and filed everything of importance, and have been waiting for years for someone to finally ask for it. Unrelated Edit: If you want something to be archived for eternity, include a recipe on it somewhere. I'm in the middle of scanning my grandmother's recipes, and the number of unrelated publications she kept from national, state, and local entities dating to the 1950s solely because they put some grandma-bait in them somewhere is astounding.