6 ms·

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

42 points by Reltair 14y ago

rorrr 14y ago
Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life. Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.
- sokoloff 14y ago
  It appears to me like you're taking the total outsource IT spending and dividing it by the total number of people on the Romney campaign payroll. Of course that yields a non-sensical answer.
  - rorrr 14y ago
    510 people seems a bit low for the whole campaign, but assuming you're correct, 1 mil is still a ridiculously small amount of money for such a serious campaign. We're basically talking the position for the most powerful man in the world.
dkhenry 14y ago
sound like there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get an inside position on the next Administration in four years. I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  You could probably get funding to create such an infrastructure for other groups that do canvassing, like PIRG, and open source much of it. Then you'd be in a position to sell consulting services.
- incision 14y ago
  >I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to. I don't know if I'd make that bet. Without the right connections I expect you stand little/no chance of getting an audience to have your plan heard and even if you do there will be backers expecting to be handed such work along with half a dozen bigger names claiming to be able to provide identical service. I'm sure if Nate Silver wants to start a political IT consultancy someone will pay attention to him, but without that kind of demonstrated value - that can only really be demonstrated during an election - I don't see how even the best plan gets any visibility. It's an interesting idea for sure though.
- patdennis 14y ago
  You'd want to either go through the DNC, NGP/VAN [1], or maybe the Analyst Institute [2]. Those are the groups who both have the right connections and would be willing to take the meeting. [1] http://www.ngpvan.com/ http://www.ngpvan.com/ [2] https://analystinstitute.org/ https://analystinstitute.org/
- politician 14y ago
  Honestly, the Obama for America technology team is already ahead of you there with proven delivery. Did you see the Atlantic interview with Harper Reed (OFA's CTO)? If not, it's worth a read. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... (EDIT: Which not to say it's a bad idea, just that there is a well-connected established competitor.)
forensic 14y ago
Wow, he ran his campaign like the ran the companies he destroyed/raided. You have to wonder how this incompetence translated into electoral failure. Maybe a better businessman would have given Obama a challenge.
mikeash 14y ago
This is probably unfair and biased, but what the heck. If this whole story is true, it seems crazy that this man nearly became president. He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way. Anybody knowledgeable in IT should have been able to tell him that this approach was a bad idea. I mean, Best Buy's consulting subsidiary? They probably thought Best Buy was a cool place that was "with it" when it came to tech. How clueless can you get? It sure sounds like the Romney campaign's IT was run on "connections" and ideology rather than sound technology. This was probably a good way to run a campaign a few decades ago, but doesn't seem to work as well today. It will be interesting to see how this stuff evolves, anyway. The US presidential campaign cycle is so slow relative to the technology sector that it seems hard to apply lessons from previous elections. The current smartphone revolution was just getting off the ground in 2008, so there wasn't much experience to draw on for 2012. By the time 2016 rolls around, will 2012's experience be similarly obsolete?
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  This seems like confirmation bias, mixed with a healthy dose of overestimating the importance of your profession. If a similar story came out about Obama's campaign, would you have really written that it's crazy that he got elected? I'm not a Romney fan, and I think this story should be embarrassing for him, but let's not get carried away. Running a software project (even if not directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential candidate at your peril.
  - thrownaway2424 14y ago
    Running the nation isn't easy, either. You're supposed to delegate responsibility to people who know what they are doing.
  - pwthornton 14y ago
    I do agree that presidents shouldn't need to be technologists. It's nice if they are, but being able to run a software product is not the most important thing for a potential president to run. However, that doesn't mean lessons can't be gleamed and abstracted. The President has to outsource a lot of knowledge and work. Presidents are typically experts at something, but not at most things. President Obama is a former Constitutional Law Professor. It's reasonable to assume that he understands Constitutional Law at a very high level; it's also reasonable to assume that Constitutional Law is one of the few things that he has a very high level of expertise at. All Presidents have to work with other experts and teams to get things done. The fact that Governor Romney's tech teams failed so badly can be looked at a mark of his management abilities. He doesn't need to be a tech expert, but he does need to know how to put the right people in place to be successful. I look at these failings as a case study as to what could of happened with other areas Governor Romney could have had to outsource: defense leadership, diplomacy, transportation policy and vision, etc. At some point, you can't pass the buck. Steve Jobs said reasons stop mattering when you hit the vp level at Apple. Assuredly reasons have to stop mattering when you reach the level of potential president of the United States of America.
stcredzero 14y ago
> Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from old friends. This is a decent way of having a lot of small groups doing their own thing. It's a terrible way to coordinate an organization as a whole to accomplish a specific goal.
mrkmcknz 14y ago
With all the talk of this being a big data driven election I was surprised to not see Palantir utilised by either party. If I was running for office I would be giving those guys a call.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Companies that milk the government all four years try to avoid the partisan fray during elections. There is a parallel industry dedicated to campaigns. Any defense contractor that accepts employment by a campaign should be guilty for mutiny and treason.
ig1 14y ago
This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism. It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard. There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an ineffective team, but this isn't it.
- mjg59 14y ago
  From the article: "even internal projects like Orca were dependent on quick fixes from outside talent" I don't see anywhere that it implies that Orca was built by Best Buy.
  - ig1 14y ago
    The whole article ends with a paragraph on Orca, implying the issues discussed above were the cause of Orca. As I said a careful reading will indicate that they were completely unrelated, but the article is written in such a way that many people will conclude from the article that they are related. Look at the other comments people have made about the article, how many are from people who think the article is about operational IT and how many think it's about strategically important custom software ?
- saraid216 14y ago
  The fail-whale articles about Orca talked about how it was a Microsoft partner that built it.
phillmv 14y ago
I quite liked the profile of @harper in The Atlantic the other day, even if it was a little too fawning. To me the lesson to be drawn from these articles is that the Obama campaign saw their IT infrastructure as a 'core business unit' and vertically integrated it, whereas the Romney campaign treated it like any other commodity service. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...
dekayed 14y ago
The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal of the campaign. Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished. Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?
- saraid216 14y ago
  I'm guessing that the party organization itself isn't allowed to do anything other than nominate their candidate. The campaign, of which the GOTV system is a part, has to be directed by the candidate. This makes sense in that you're technically electing a person, not a party.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Sure, but the party could contract with a consulting group, which could take on the winner as a client. It is all the same people circulating between the parties and the campaigns and the consultancies and the PACs.
shrikant 14y ago
Um. At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company. This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  On the other hand, who doesn't think that their own company is the best for any given job?
  - Evbn 14y ago
    That is why the leader's job is to critically assess conflicts of interests in subordinates.
philip1209 14y ago
The 37Signals allotment was high - did they manage the whole campaign in Basecamp?
- Evbn 14y ago
  Wow, that is the first ever known (to the general public case) of a 37s customer. Not a great press hit. And for a Chicago company! That is Obama territory.
pavel_lishin 14y ago
> In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work. I wonder how many hours that actually ended up being. $12,000 for six months seems like a pittance, but if his job involved showing up on Sunday afternoons and making sure that security patches had been installed Saturday night, that doesn't seem like a bad bargain.
- GabrielF00 14y ago
  I suspect it was a massive workload that came with the benefit of working for something that you believe in and developing contacts at the highest levels. Political campaigns tend to work young people very hard for very little money with the expectation that you're gaining invaluable experience.
mrbill 14y ago
Optimize.ly - didn't that spin out of work done by/for Obama in '08?
ricardobeat 14y ago
Interesting: apparently they paid only $790 for Basecamp, while spending >$1k on Dropbox, >$4k on optimizely/new relic, $20k on salesforce, $1.9k on resumator (?), >$16k on other unknown analytics. Looks like 37signals is severely underpricing it's products (and even then they make tons of money).
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  They might have gotten it early on though not used it as extensively as they'd planned on using it, but kept paying for it. Just because they'd paid basecamp doesn't mean it was necessarily something that was vitally used at the center of the campaign.

42 points by Reltair 14y ago

rorrr 14y ago

Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life. Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.

sokoloff 14y ago
It appears to me like you're taking the total outsource IT spending and dividing it by the total number of people on the Romney campaign payroll. Of course that yields a non-sensical answer.
- rorrr 14y ago
  510 people seems a bit low for the whole campaign, but assuming you're correct, 1 mil is still a ridiculously small amount of money for such a serious campaign. We're basically talking the position for the most powerful man in the world.

dkhenry 14y ago

sound like there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get an inside position on the next Administration in four years. I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.

stcredzero 14y ago
You could probably get funding to create such an infrastructure for other groups that do canvassing, like PIRG, and open source much of it. Then you'd be in a position to sell consulting services.
incision 14y ago
>I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to. I don't know if I'd make that bet. Without the right connections I expect you stand little/no chance of getting an audience to have your plan heard and even if you do there will be backers expecting to be handed such work along with half a dozen bigger names claiming to be able to provide identical service. I'm sure if Nate Silver wants to start a political IT consultancy someone will pay attention to him, but without that kind of demonstrated value - that can only really be demonstrated during an election - I don't see how even the best plan gets any visibility. It's an interesting idea for sure though.
patdennis 14y ago
You'd want to either go through the DNC, NGP/VAN [1], or maybe the Analyst Institute [2]. Those are the groups who both have the right connections and would be willing to take the meeting. [1] http://www.ngpvan.com/ http://www.ngpvan.com/ [2] https://analystinstitute.org/ https://analystinstitute.org/
politician 14y ago
Honestly, the Obama for America technology team is already ahead of you there with proven delivery. Did you see the Atlantic interview with Harper Reed (OFA's CTO)? If not, it's worth a read. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... (EDIT: Which not to say it's a bad idea, just that there is a well-connected established competitor.)

forensic 14y ago

Wow, he ran his campaign like the ran the companies he destroyed/raided. You have to wonder how this incompetence translated into electoral failure. Maybe a better businessman would have given Obama a challenge.

mikeash 14y ago

This is probably unfair and biased, but what the heck. If this whole story is true, it seems crazy that this man nearly became president. He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way. Anybody knowledgeable in IT should have been able to tell him that this approach was a bad idea. I mean, Best Buy's consulting subsidiary? They probably thought Best Buy was a cool place that was "with it" when it came to tech. How clueless can you get? It sure sounds like the Romney campaign's IT was run on "connections" and ideology rather than sound technology. This was probably a good way to run a campaign a few decades ago, but doesn't seem to work as well today. It will be interesting to see how this stuff evolves, anyway. The US presidential campaign cycle is so slow relative to the technology sector that it seems hard to apply lessons from previous elections. The current smartphone revolution was just getting off the ground in 2008, so there wasn't much experience to draw on for 2012. By the time 2016 rolls around, will 2012's experience be similarly obsolete?

reitzensteinm 14y ago
This seems like confirmation bias, mixed with a healthy dose of overestimating the importance of your profession. If a similar story came out about Obama's campaign, would you have really written that it's crazy that he got elected? I'm not a Romney fan, and I think this story should be embarrassing for him, but let's not get carried away. Running a software project (even if not directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential candidate at your peril.
- thrownaway2424 14y ago
  Running the nation isn't easy, either. You're supposed to delegate responsibility to people who know what they are doing.
- pwthornton 14y ago
  I do agree that presidents shouldn't need to be technologists. It's nice if they are, but being able to run a software product is not the most important thing for a potential president to run. However, that doesn't mean lessons can't be gleamed and abstracted. The President has to outsource a lot of knowledge and work. Presidents are typically experts at something, but not at most things. President Obama is a former Constitutional Law Professor. It's reasonable to assume that he understands Constitutional Law at a very high level; it's also reasonable to assume that Constitutional Law is one of the few things that he has a very high level of expertise at. All Presidents have to work with other experts and teams to get things done. The fact that Governor Romney's tech teams failed so badly can be looked at a mark of his management abilities. He doesn't need to be a tech expert, but he does need to know how to put the right people in place to be successful. I look at these failings as a case study as to what could of happened with other areas Governor Romney could have had to outsource: defense leadership, diplomacy, transportation policy and vision, etc. At some point, you can't pass the buck. Steve Jobs said reasons stop mattering when you hit the vp level at Apple. Assuredly reasons have to stop mattering when you reach the level of potential president of the United States of America.

stcredzero 14y ago

> Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from old friends. This is a decent way of having a lot of small groups doing their own thing. It's a terrible way to coordinate an organization as a whole to accomplish a specific goal.

mrkmcknz 14y ago

With all the talk of this being a big data driven election I was surprised to not see Palantir utilised by either party. If I was running for office I would be giving those guys a call.

Evbn 14y ago
Companies that milk the government all four years try to avoid the partisan fray during elections. There is a parallel industry dedicated to campaigns. Any defense contractor that accepts employment by a campaign should be guilty for mutiny and treason.

ig1 14y ago

This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism. It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard. There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an ineffective team, but this isn't it.

mjg59 14y ago
From the article: "even internal projects like Orca were dependent on quick fixes from outside talent" I don't see anywhere that it implies that Orca was built by Best Buy.
- ig1 14y ago
  The whole article ends with a paragraph on Orca, implying the issues discussed above were the cause of Orca. As I said a careful reading will indicate that they were completely unrelated, but the article is written in such a way that many people will conclude from the article that they are related. Look at the other comments people have made about the article, how many are from people who think the article is about operational IT and how many think it's about strategically important custom software ?
saraid216 14y ago
The fail-whale articles about Orca talked about how it was a Microsoft partner that built it.

phillmv 14y ago

I quite liked the profile of @harper in The Atlantic the other day, even if it was a little too fawning. To me the lesson to be drawn from these articles is that the Obama campaign saw their IT infrastructure as a 'core business unit' and vertically integrated it, whereas the Romney campaign treated it like any other commodity service. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...

dekayed 14y ago

The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal of the campaign. Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished. Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?

saraid216 14y ago
I'm guessing that the party organization itself isn't allowed to do anything other than nominate their candidate. The campaign, of which the GOTV system is a part, has to be directed by the candidate. This makes sense in that you're technically electing a person, not a party.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Sure, but the party could contract with a consulting group, which could take on the winner as a client. It is all the same people circulating between the parties and the campaigns and the consultancies and the PACs.

shrikant 14y ago

Um. At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company. This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
On the other hand, who doesn't think that their own company is the best for any given job?
- Evbn 14y ago
  That is why the leader's job is to critically assess conflicts of interests in subordinates.

philip1209 14y ago

The 37Signals allotment was high - did they manage the whole campaign in Basecamp?

Evbn 14y ago
Wow, that is the first ever known (to the general public case) of a 37s customer. Not a great press hit. And for a Chicago company! That is Obama territory.

pavel_lishin 14y ago

> In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work. I wonder how many hours that actually ended up being. $12,000 for six months seems like a pittance, but if his job involved showing up on Sunday afternoons and making sure that security patches had been installed Saturday night, that doesn't seem like a bad bargain.

GabrielF00 14y ago
I suspect it was a massive workload that came with the benefit of working for something that you believe in and developing contacts at the highest levels. Political campaigns tend to work young people very hard for very little money with the expectation that you're gaining invaluable experience.

mrbill 14y ago

Optimize.ly - didn't that spin out of work done by/for Obama in '08?

ricardobeat 14y ago

Interesting: apparently they paid only $790 for Basecamp, while spending >$1k on Dropbox, >$4k on optimizely/new relic, $20k on salesforce, $1.9k on resumator (?), >$16k on other unknown analytics. Looks like 37signals is severely underpricing it's products (and even then they make tons of money).

mgkimsal 14y ago
They might have gotten it early on though not used it as extensively as they'd planned on using it, but kept paying for it. Just because they'd paid basecamp doesn't mean it was necessarily something that was vitally used at the center of the campaign.