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This article is only touching on a small portion of why government IT is terrible. People like to blame contractors but I think a large part of the problem is

by GVIrish 13y ago

This article is only touching on a small portion of why government IT is terrible. People like to blame contractors but I think a large part of the problem is that the federal employees who are responsible for these big projects are rarely held accountable for failure. In fact, the lack of accountability for federal employees is why so much work was farmed out to contractors in the first place. Then there's the fact that a lot of the decisions in government IT are made by people who have little understanding of how successful software gets built. People don't understand the importance of defining the scope of the project properly. Or you get people that change requirements willy nilly. Or you find people that are just trying to protect their little fiefdom so you end up with wasteful duplication of effort or withholding of vital information. The Ars article indirectly touches on the fiefdom issue. When you have dysfunctional IT departments or applications, often times instead of fixing the dysfunction, someone just creates their own little separate IT effort to get around it. So the VIP's might get something functional while the peons get classic ASP & Access. What I find very interesting about the Healthcare.gov problem is that this may be the first time that a major federal IT project failure has major political consequences for elected officials. If Healthcare.gov ends up being a crash and burn failure, it could result in Republicans gaining enough power in the next election to overturn the whole ACA.

RougeFemme 13y ago
I don't think lack of accountability is what pushed the work out to contractors. And if that is the case, does that mean the accountability "stick" got pushed out to the contractors. I think work got pushed out to contractors from a desire to out-source and because contractors, for various reasons, generally do a much better job of staying abreast of best practices than the government employees. And I say this as someone who has worked on both sides of the fence. I agree that requirements are a big issue. In addition to the requirements issues you mention, there is the problem with the "business line owners" attempting to unnecessarily dictate implementation details, poorly defining the functional requirements in the first place and ignoring interfacing systems.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Where lack of accountability comes is the idea that contractors can be fired if they don't do a good job, whereas it is much more difficult to fire a full-time employee. So rather than solving that problem, most of the government's software development is farmed out to contractors. The other reasoning for contractors is that contractors don't get retirement benefits that FTE's do, so in theory that saves the govt money but in practice it probably doesn't, given that contractor bill rates are usually 200-300% or in excess of what FTE salaries are. Not to say that FTE's are great or anything, contractors do tend to me more up-to-date on technology but I think that is a result of the government employee hiring practices and compensation scale. Yeah I've seen a lot of "business line owner" issues like the ones you've mentioned. Another common one is that software is often built to mirror dysfunctional and wasteful business processes. So you either get software that is needlessly complex, or you build the software then have to re-do it because people realize how bad the underlying business process was.
  - acdha 13y ago
    > Where lack of accountability comes is the idea that contractors can be fired if they don't do a good job, whereas it is much more difficult to fire a full-time employee. When was the last time you saw that happen? The only major .gov IT screwup which I can recall having any consequences for the vendor was the FBI's virtual Case File system. Everything else tends to get brushed under the rug either to avoid disrupting the relationship (!) or because nobody wants to have to explain why they didn't say anything before the failure was publicly obvious.
    - GVIrish 13y ago
      Exactly. The idea is that contractors can be fired for a poor job, but the reality is that it rarely happens. Federal employees are rarely held accountable for their failures so in turn they rarely hold contractors accountable. Maybe that contractor doesn't get to stay on for option years, but many times they do for a myriad of reasons. Then there's the incestual revolving door between government and contracting companies. Government lead retires, then goes to work for the contractor they used to oversee. The biggest contractors use that as a prime mechanism for earning new business. In some companies the best path to get into senior management positions is by being a former Fed.

by GVIrish 13y ago

RougeFemme 13y ago

I don't think lack of accountability is what pushed the work out to contractors. And if that is the case, does that mean the accountability "stick" got pushed out to the contractors. I think work got pushed out to contractors from a desire to out-source and because contractors, for various reasons, generally do a much better job of staying abreast of best practices than the government employees. And I say this as someone who has worked on both sides of the fence. I agree that requirements are a big issue. In addition to the requirements issues you mention, there is the problem with the "business line owners" attempting to unnecessarily dictate implementation details, poorly defining the functional requirements in the first place and ignoring interfacing systems.

GVIrish 13y ago
Where lack of accountability comes is the idea that contractors can be fired if they don't do a good job, whereas it is much more difficult to fire a full-time employee. So rather than solving that problem, most of the government's software development is farmed out to contractors. The other reasoning for contractors is that contractors don't get retirement benefits that FTE's do, so in theory that saves the govt money but in practice it probably doesn't, given that contractor bill rates are usually 200-300% or in excess of what FTE salaries are. Not to say that FTE's are great or anything, contractors do tend to me more up-to-date on technology but I think that is a result of the government employee hiring practices and compensation scale. Yeah I've seen a lot of "business line owner" issues like the ones you've mentioned. Another common one is that software is often built to mirror dysfunctional and wasteful business processes. So you either get software that is needlessly complex, or you build the software then have to re-do it because people realize how bad the underlying business process was.
- acdha 13y ago
  > Where lack of accountability comes is the idea that contractors can be fired if they don't do a good job, whereas it is much more difficult to fire a full-time employee. When was the last time you saw that happen? The only major .gov IT screwup which I can recall having any consequences for the vendor was the FBI's virtual Case File system. Everything else tends to get brushed under the rug either to avoid disrupting the relationship (!) or because nobody wants to have to explain why they didn't say anything before the failure was publicly obvious.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    Exactly. The idea is that contractors can be fired for a poor job, but the reality is that it rarely happens. Federal employees are rarely held accountable for their failures so in turn they rarely hold contractors accountable. Maybe that contractor doesn't get to stay on for option years, but many times they do for a myriad of reasons. Then there's the incestual revolving door between government and contracting companies. Government lead retires, then goes to work for the contractor they used to oversee. The biggest contractors use that as a prime mechanism for earning new business. In some companies the best path to get into senior management positions is by being a former Fed.