9 ms·

Sinkhole of bureaucracy

109 points by AndrewDucker 13y ago

adamwong246 13y ago
These organizations seem almost organic, an emergent phenomenon that protects it's own existence. How does one kill a bureaucracy? It's times like these I'm tempted to throw my support behind the "Eric Schmidt for CEO of America" stunt.
- AndrewDucker 13y ago
  This one seems to be trying to computerise, in order to be more efficient. It's just that every time they've tried, they've failed.
  - Ma8ee 13y ago
    THe article didn't say much why they failed. There might be some subtle sabotaging going on.
    - mschuster91 13y ago
      The main point is the sheer mass of regulations and laws affecting and quite possibly contradicting each other. Essentially you try to make a system that "fits all cases"... with every possible permutation. Bound to fail, actually.
      - kiba 13y ago
        Congress don't do sanity check. They just add new features to a hairball of a codebase, multiplying the bugs and complexity of the system.
    - curiouscats 13y ago
      A GAO report talks about the problems: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-580T http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-580T "Risk management: OPM did not have a process for identifying and tracking project risks and mitigation strategies on a regular basis. Thus, it lacked a mechanism to address potential problems that could adversely impact the cost, schedule, and quality of the modernization effort. Organizational change management: OPM had not adequately prepared its staff for changes to job responsibilities resulting from the modernization by developing a detailed transition plan. This could lead to confusion about roles and responsibilities and hinder effective system implementation. Testing: The results of tests 1 month prior to the deployment of a major system component revealed that it had not performed as intended. These defects, along with a compressed testing schedule, increased the risk that the system would not work as intended upon deployment." and on and on.
  - ericHosick 13y ago
    My feeling, from limited experience, is that it is easier to bring/hire people into an existing/new process than it is to change an existing process people are familiar with.
- asdfologist 13y ago
  Great idea, let's bring wage-fixing to the US government.
- nhaehnle 13y ago
  The article actually hints at how the problem could be solved: Simplify the rules (read: laws) that the system has to implement sufficiently that switching over to a computerized system becomes simple enough. However, such efforts are boring and don't score political points when they're meant as genuine help. The other point to note is that they are already partly computerized, as the article admits. Part of the problem may be that retirement systems have strong backward compatibility requirements by their nature. So this is actually a problem that might fix itself given another decade or two, as more people's files become fully electronic. It seems to me that (as often) announcing a big project to try to fix it all in one go is just bound to fail. Instead, the best way forward would probably be a small number of competent people who are given the freedom to refactor the process from within. A good starting point seems to be to reduce the number of computer -> paper -> computer turnarounds that seem to exist with the current system.
  - jerf 13y ago
    It's a broken feedback loop. The people who feel the pain are hardly any more connected to Congress than I am; how can information about the pain get back to the body that can actually do something about it? In a nutshell, it can't. Further, I as a taxpayer am paying for this, so technically I'm in pain too, but how can I close this feedback loop? I can't. To those who are saying here "Privatizing isn't a miracle solution", since, ahem, you are trying to preempt the libertarian argument since you sense that it's a rather strong one here, well, of course it's not a miracle cure, but in general in the private world you can't get this level of brokenness in the feedback loop. Somebody would have had to do something decades ago because this would have gone out of business, or some equivalent. Private industry's advantage here isn't that it could somehow fix this problem, it is that it has the "advantage" of being unable to sustain this level of pathology in the first place. Before you post your example of equal pathology in the private field, my question to you would be, has that pathology been present for 40 years? Some private entities do indeed become healthy enough and bank enough funds to be able to descend into this level of pathology, but they can't do it indefinitely; eventually they must either clean up their act (IBM) or go out of business. And when we talk about "big government", it isn't always literal size... sometimes it's things like an enormous maze of interlocking regulations that nobody ever asked "Does the costs of this regulation exceed the benefit when combined with our other enormous pile of regulations?" Obviously, Federal government workers are going to get their retirement benefits, and growing the employment of the mine isn't going to particularly cause sudden new regulatory overreach or anything. The literal physical human footprint is not intrinsically a problem. But this is "big government" at its worst, a regulatory footprint so large it half paralyzes itself... is there really anybody who would argue in favor of this? (We can't even particularly argue that we are better off with this particular department paralyzed on some weird libertarian "better a paralyzed bureaucracy than an efficient one" freedom argument... who benefits from this accounting being this slow?)
- nfoz 13y ago
  Bureaucracy is a wonderful thing, an amazing achievement for humanity. Compare a nation with a functioning bureaucracy vs. a nation that doesn't. The paperwork chain breaks corruption, breaks broken incentives, localizes the impact of cheating and makes it accountable. If it's implemented well. Bureaucracy doesn't have to be a dirty word, although we're all disgusted by the waste it can cause. Especially I see in the U.S. where government systems tend to be waayy worse than I'd experienced working within the government in Canada. Even banks have a different internal character between the US and Canada; at least the one Canadian bank I've worked in simply did a much better job of having a functioning, appropriate systemized bureaucratic means of operation than the inane politicking-slowpoke-dysfunctional bureaucracies of some of their competitors. A few of my friends at Google have complained about bureaucracy there, so shrug I'm not sure Eric Schmidt would exactly be our saviour here.
asdfologist 13y ago
This is exactly why many areas of government should be privatized. With zero competition and virtually no accountability, these bureaucracies have no incentive to become more efficient.
- badsock 13y ago
  I disagree based on my experience with equally bureaucratic and wasteful private organizations. My take is that we simply don't have the right organizational frameworks to undertake large, ongoing tasks involving lots of people. I don't know what the answer is, but watching the results of privatization binges in a number of countries in the past, I don't think it involves moving things along the public/private axis. There are more ways to motivate people than just competition.
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    Having worked with many people on teams from a couple to hundreds. The answer is a smart self-directing AI that must be obeyed. Pretty much everything else I've seen tried and failed. The unofficial motto of the last place I worked was "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
- kiba 13y ago
  Just because you shift the organization from public to private does not make the problem goes away. The true problem is incentive. For example, private contractors build the rockets for NASA. But there is no incentive to do it cheaply and right. Any cost overrun is covered by the government. This is in contrast to the COTS program initated by NASA which is oriented toward rewarding space contractors on efficiency and milestones reached. They don't cover cost overrun and responsibility lies with the suppliers. For example, if SpaceX or Orbital Science's cargo ship blows up, they're responsible.
  - asdfologist 13y ago
    That's why I said there needs to be competition and accountability. You're not going to get competition in the public sector.
bhewes 13y ago
If anything this shows there is a ton of low-lying fruit for the Feds to pick to improve operational efficiency. This along with the Pentagon's inability to do accounting should allow for big improvements. And due to budget constraints and more government services coming online (Healthcare) there might actual be a reason to push through some of these changes. Or at least that is my hope.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
acdha 13y ago
It's easy to blame government bureaucracy but the real problem is the combination of lack of empowerment and policy which discourages hiring qualified staff in-house. Most agencies have been facing budget cuts for awhile and there has been congressional pressure against hiring staff because hiring contractors allows you to campaign on having shrunk the government, you can receive donations from contractors, and few reporters will actually do the homework needed to note that "saved" positions tend to cost more once you factor in overhead. Even if you do get permission to hire techies, the GS pay scale limits who you're going to be able to hire. There aren't all that many jobs at the top end of the scale and even fewer will be non-managerial spots which means that your sales-pitch for putting up with bureaucracy and political meddling starts with a significant pay cut for high demand professions. (This is the same reason why regulatory capture is such a problem – we'd be much better off giving the SEC staff 400% raises than having them make decisions about likely future employers when they get tired of below-market pay) If you do manage to make it that far, you can do some interesting things. I know the CFPB runs a far more modern IT shop because they were able to start without years of legacy-blinkered culture and hire skilled staff directly rather than relying on contractors through a procurement process which basically legally binds you to the least functional waterfall process. It'd be really good for the entire government if that became the model in the future – hire good people, give them autonomy to get projects done and responsibility to deliver.
al2o3cr 13y ago
"“I used to chase people for months — literally — for one signature on one piece of paper. You want to talk about an egregious waste of taxpayer money?” recalled one worker who left the mine recently and declined to be named because of fears of retribution." And of course if they didn't chase down every signature, we'd be reading an otherwise identical article from WaPo whining about "wastefraudandabuse".
- rodgerd 13y ago
  Exactly. I work in a government town (although not for the government), and the fear of "gotcha" is the single biggest inhibiting factor for getting things done. There are hordes of politically-motivated eyes waiting for the smallest chink in your armour, so they can blow it into a huge story. It literally doesn't matter what people try to do - if there are checks and balances it's "waste"; if they try to do something innovative and interesting it's "recklessness" and so on. The people have the government departments they deserve.
  - bdunbar 13y ago
    > The people have the government departments they deserve. Yeah - and they inflict it on the rest of us.
  - Aloha 13y ago
    Yeah, I second this, I've learned to phrase questions in such a way when dealing with government employees, where they can give approval, without having to either say yes or no - in other words phrase it in such a way that they dont have to say no - No with the government is the default answer.
rayiner 13y ago
> The root of the problem, he said, was that the system had trouble synthesizing information from so many sources and calculations based on so many laws. So the gist of the article is that we pay these folks to do things with paper because the computer based replacements aren't flexible enough to handle the problem.
- revelation 13y ago
  I can certainly imagine how that went. A monstrous Java Enterprise deployment, with thousands of classes and many more interfaces, and illustrous names like IRetireeAnuniatingSpecialCaseBenefitCalculatorSourceSinkBean. Maybe the whole problem is too complex to be able to solve it in one go, but thats why we abstract complexity away and return to solving the simple things, such as reliable digital document storage. Just digitize papers as they come in or are retrieved from "cold storage", and over time you have enough in the working set to get most of these poor people out of the mine and into some sunlight, jesus...
incision 13y ago
I'm painfully familiar with some of this. My favorite example of just how dysfunctional it all is was an agency which made a small fuss about how they were modernizing by allowing online job applications 10+ years ago. Behind the scenes the applications were simply emailed to a shared mailbox then printed out and re-entered by hand into the actual position management system. The position management system was so dated and overloaded that the folks entering data had learned how long they could expect to wait (measured in minutes to tens of minutes) when moving between a given set of screens. They would submit one screen then work on something else. Eventually, the agency spent an enormous amount of money implementing some combination of systems from SAP to consolidate / replace everything. Now the same folks who were retyping resumes are cut and pasting them into a series of webforms and emailing around spreadsheets of all the information that the system lacks forms for. Hiring managers who had little or no input on requirements for new system don't even log in, they request printouts from HR. --- Having seen things like this play out a few times now I have a few ideas about what could help one of these projects actually succeed: * Generate or at least inform requirements with honest information from people at the ground level. Those people toiling away filling up manilla folders and doing data entry know the actual process. The farther up the chain you go the story will move away from reality toward what's effectively nothing more than the way things are supposed to work. Problem is, the layers of management don't want to allow that kind of access and will retaliate against their subordinates for being honest. Also, those low-level people are likely aware enough to know that they're talking themselves out of a job. I think the former requires a powerful and attentive enough personality leading the effort to simply bulldoze the managers. I wonder if the latter can't be addressed by buying everyone out with generous severance or early retirement. It would puts a cap on the cost of these broken jobs and processes rather than continuing to cycle people ad money through them. * As a rule, the technical and procurement staff of these agencies aren't competent to generate requirements or evaluate what's produced when dealing with outside contractors and implementers. At the same time, the agencies don't pay enough or move fast enough to maintain a competent internal staff. This is really hard. Hiring outside experts seems to actually work against the goal as they will invariably work more for some particular vendor than the agency. Big companies absolutely collude and actively work to hold down smaller competitors so "competitive" anything doesn't really work. One idea I've been kicking around is a sort of a open source template for government system/project requirements. It would be a easy to follow "test suite" which proposals could be compared against. It would raise flags or fail plans and terms which don't meet the standard of contributors with domain knowledge. I'd like to write more on this, but I've got a few things to handle this evening.
Mz 13y ago
As a minimum, I think they could scan papers into a document system. We had this when I was in insurance. It still required review by a person but most files were digital. This basic thing already exists. I don't understand why it is not being used for the federal retirement system. Insurance is probably just as bad as the retirement system: Policies have to comply with state laws in fifty different states and there are all kinds of SNAFU things that go on because of it.
lambda 13y ago
So, I've had a tendency to roll my eyes at the "agile" movement, and how much faith people put in it that it must be the best thing since slice bread. I've frequently said that a lot of it is just common sense, some of it is just needless process that just happens to be different, not worse or better, than traditional processes, and there are a couple of good points that agile methodologies have brought about. But then I look at something like this, and I realize that common sense isn't necessarily so common in a big bureaucracy like this. They have tried three times to automate this, and failed each time? They've spent 7 years on one attempt, with absolutely nothing to show for it? I can't imaging going seven years without some kind of incremental release that you can use to gauge whether it's working or not. I mean, why do they seem to think that it's necessary to solve the whole problem in one big, opaque project? You would think they could do it incrementally, automating the easiest pieces or automating one step of the process while leaving a fallback for manual processing for the more complex cases or the other steps.
- ams6110 13y ago
  The counterintuitive thing that many people don't understand about government software projects is that failure is the norm. There are relatively few "big" consultancies that win these projects, and their numbers include Oracle, IBM, Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp, SAIC, Booz-Allen Hamilton, and a few others. Their goal in government procurements is not to deliver working software, it's just to win the contract, and then staff it with as many people as they can. We've known since The Mythical Man-Month and other books such as Peopleware that high staffing levels does not help most software projects, in fact it hurts them. But if the project fails, which most do, they all still get paid. And they will still win other contracts. Delivery of working software is just not high on the priority list--winning contracts and staffing them is. There are all the usual problems with big software projects, and add to it that most government procurement is still based on the experience of building physical things (jet fighters, ships, highways, etc.) which really doesn't work for software. But the big reason governments spend millions of dollars and waste years of time on software projects is because the contractors are not incented to deliver working software. In fact their incentives are to deliver failed projects, so that they can bid on them again.
evolve2k 13y ago
'Work in Progress' is a key form of muda or waste in lean philosophy. The key is to eliminate waste coming into the system. Employees need to be empowered to, send straight back incomplete paperwork and to update the forms & instructions coming into the system that are contributing to the waste. Considering the gravitational mass of all these processes I would work on bringing lean manufacturing approaches in first before deriving a computer based solution. As per all these things its going to take a lot of leadership to drive any type of real change. Ref: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
nostromo 13y ago
I'm both horrified and comforted. "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." -Eugene McCarthy
drdeadringer 13y ago
> "What is modern?" Oh, well, let's not be too hasty in becoming efficient and up-to-date here. Obviously, having a sneaker-net is fast enough for you simply because the name has the term "net" in it. One of my old employers has a few vintage DEC VAXes if you want to start out on saving on your pencil budget. I can confirm, though that the "chase the physical signature" game is still alive and well. /shiver I would, however, like to be the pizza guy with a security clearance. Employment while it lasts :D
hindsightbias 13y ago
For $55M a year, this is cheap. The mistake was to repeatedly spend 100's of millions to try to automate it. Go take a 35 yr old SF171 or such and scan, OCR and verify it. Get back to me when you can do that cheaply 10M times.
- acchow 13y ago
  A 61-day processing period is not cheap for the person waiting for money. You want to digitize old forms for retired people? This is entirely the wrong approach. New data should be in digital form. Not even all new data, just one vertical at a time - new payroll data, new business expense data, new insurance claims data, etc. This shards the work into tractable, testable, measurable units. There will be a (long) period when processing retirement forms will need to pull data from both analog and digital sources. That time will eventually pass, and the analog gradually phased out.
  - hindsightbias 13y ago
    Investing 100's of millions into a parallel system that won't yield much until a good portion of your future retirees are in it (and all 50 diferrent federal agencies records are integrated in) is a hard sell in any universe. In the meantime, that system will obsolesce in 5 years and you'll have to redo it all again.
  - watt 13y ago
    Are you aware of time periods involved, though? When you say "new data" do you understand that this new data will only become pertinent in about 50 years, when the employee that just came in to system, retires. 50 years later. And meanwhile, you are processing paperwork for people that entered the system 50 years ago: on today, 1964. (Ok, maybe closer 40 years, but the point is the very long storage time.) Even if all new data is digital today, what about 50 years later, how easy will it be to use digital files that were generated 50 years earlier. What if file formats change every 10 years. Then 50 years on, you got 5 different file formats you must be able to work with.
- jpatokal 13y ago
FollowSteph3 13y ago
I wrote an article about this having lived through it for a shilled called Why a hammer costs $5000? And it really all comes down to motivations being very badly lined up trying versus just doing the same. The link is: http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost-5000/ http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost...
ballard 13y ago
This is how I imagine this department operates: http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY (Brazil)

109 points by AndrewDucker 13y ago

These organizations seem almost organic, an emergent phenomenon that protects it's own existence. How does one kill a bureaucracy? It's times like these I'm tempted to throw my support behind the "Eric Schmidt for CEO of America" stunt.

AndrewDucker 13y ago
This one seems to be trying to computerise, in order to be more efficient. It's just that every time they've tried, they've failed.
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  THe article didn't say much why they failed. There might be some subtle sabotaging going on.
  - mschuster91 13y ago
    The main point is the sheer mass of regulations and laws affecting and quite possibly contradicting each other. Essentially you try to make a system that "fits all cases"... with every possible permutation. Bound to fail, actually.
    - kiba 13y ago
      Congress don't do sanity check. They just add new features to a hairball of a codebase, multiplying the bugs and complexity of the system.
  - curiouscats 13y ago
    A GAO report talks about the problems: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-580T http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-580T "Risk management: OPM did not have a process for identifying and tracking project risks and mitigation strategies on a regular basis. Thus, it lacked a mechanism to address potential problems that could adversely impact the cost, schedule, and quality of the modernization effort. Organizational change management: OPM had not adequately prepared its staff for changes to job responsibilities resulting from the modernization by developing a detailed transition plan. This could lead to confusion about roles and responsibilities and hinder effective system implementation. Testing: The results of tests 1 month prior to the deployment of a major system component revealed that it had not performed as intended. These defects, along with a compressed testing schedule, increased the risk that the system would not work as intended upon deployment." and on and on.
- ericHosick 13y ago
  My feeling, from limited experience, is that it is easier to bring/hire people into an existing/new process than it is to change an existing process people are familiar with.
asdfologist 13y ago
Great idea, let's bring wage-fixing to the US government.
nhaehnle 13y ago
The article actually hints at how the problem could be solved: Simplify the rules (read: laws) that the system has to implement sufficiently that switching over to a computerized system becomes simple enough. However, such efforts are boring and don't score political points when they're meant as genuine help. The other point to note is that they are already partly computerized, as the article admits. Part of the problem may be that retirement systems have strong backward compatibility requirements by their nature. So this is actually a problem that might fix itself given another decade or two, as more people's files become fully electronic. It seems to me that (as often) announcing a big project to try to fix it all in one go is just bound to fail. Instead, the best way forward would probably be a small number of competent people who are given the freedom to refactor the process from within. A good starting point seems to be to reduce the number of computer -> paper -> computer turnarounds that seem to exist with the current system.
- jerf 13y ago
  It's a broken feedback loop. The people who feel the pain are hardly any more connected to Congress than I am; how can information about the pain get back to the body that can actually do something about it? In a nutshell, it can't. Further, I as a taxpayer am paying for this, so technically I'm in pain too, but how can I close this feedback loop? I can't. To those who are saying here "Privatizing isn't a miracle solution", since, ahem, you are trying to preempt the libertarian argument since you sense that it's a rather strong one here, well, of course it's not a miracle cure, but in general in the private world you can't get this level of brokenness in the feedback loop. Somebody would have had to do something decades ago because this would have gone out of business, or some equivalent. Private industry's advantage here isn't that it could somehow fix this problem, it is that it has the "advantage" of being unable to sustain this level of pathology in the first place. Before you post your example of equal pathology in the private field, my question to you would be, has that pathology been present for 40 years? Some private entities do indeed become healthy enough and bank enough funds to be able to descend into this level of pathology, but they can't do it indefinitely; eventually they must either clean up their act (IBM) or go out of business. And when we talk about "big government", it isn't always literal size... sometimes it's things like an enormous maze of interlocking regulations that nobody ever asked "Does the costs of this regulation exceed the benefit when combined with our other enormous pile of regulations?" Obviously, Federal government workers are going to get their retirement benefits, and growing the employment of the mine isn't going to particularly cause sudden new regulatory overreach or anything. The literal physical human footprint is not intrinsically a problem. But this is "big government" at its worst, a regulatory footprint so large it half paralyzes itself... is there really anybody who would argue in favor of this? (We can't even particularly argue that we are better off with this particular department paralyzed on some weird libertarian "better a paralyzed bureaucracy than an efficient one" freedom argument... who benefits from this accounting being this slow?)
nfoz 13y ago
Bureaucracy is a wonderful thing, an amazing achievement for humanity. Compare a nation with a functioning bureaucracy vs. a nation that doesn't. The paperwork chain breaks corruption, breaks broken incentives, localizes the impact of cheating and makes it accountable. If it's implemented well. Bureaucracy doesn't have to be a dirty word, although we're all disgusted by the waste it can cause. Especially I see in the U.S. where government systems tend to be waayy worse than I'd experienced working within the government in Canada. Even banks have a different internal character between the US and Canada; at least the one Canadian bank I've worked in simply did a much better job of having a functioning, appropriate systemized bureaucratic means of operation than the inane politicking-slowpoke-dysfunctional bureaucracies of some of their competitors. A few of my friends at Google have complained about bureaucracy there, so shrug I'm not sure Eric Schmidt would exactly be our saviour here.

asdfologist 13y ago

This is exactly why many areas of government should be privatized. With zero competition and virtually no accountability, these bureaucracies have no incentive to become more efficient.

badsock 13y ago
I disagree based on my experience with equally bureaucratic and wasteful private organizations. My take is that we simply don't have the right organizational frameworks to undertake large, ongoing tasks involving lots of people. I don't know what the answer is, but watching the results of privatization binges in a number of countries in the past, I don't think it involves moving things along the public/private axis. There are more ways to motivate people than just competition.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  Having worked with many people on teams from a couple to hundreds. The answer is a smart self-directing AI that must be obeyed. Pretty much everything else I've seen tried and failed. The unofficial motto of the last place I worked was "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
kiba 13y ago
Just because you shift the organization from public to private does not make the problem goes away. The true problem is incentive. For example, private contractors build the rockets for NASA. But there is no incentive to do it cheaply and right. Any cost overrun is covered by the government. This is in contrast to the COTS program initated by NASA which is oriented toward rewarding space contractors on efficiency and milestones reached. They don't cover cost overrun and responsibility lies with the suppliers. For example, if SpaceX or Orbital Science's cargo ship blows up, they're responsible.
- asdfologist 13y ago
  That's why I said there needs to be competition and accountability. You're not going to get competition in the public sector.

bhewes 13y ago

If anything this shows there is a ton of low-lying fruit for the Feds to pick to improve operational efficiency. This along with the Pentagon's inability to do accounting should allow for big improvements. And due to budget constraints and more government services coming online (Healthcare) there might actual be a reason to push through some of these changes. Or at least that is my hope.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

acdha 13y ago

It's easy to blame government bureaucracy but the real problem is the combination of lack of empowerment and policy which discourages hiring qualified staff in-house. Most agencies have been facing budget cuts for awhile and there has been congressional pressure against hiring staff because hiring contractors allows you to campaign on having shrunk the government, you can receive donations from contractors, and few reporters will actually do the homework needed to note that "saved" positions tend to cost more once you factor in overhead. Even if you do get permission to hire techies, the GS pay scale limits who you're going to be able to hire. There aren't all that many jobs at the top end of the scale and even fewer will be non-managerial spots which means that your sales-pitch for putting up with bureaucracy and political meddling starts with a significant pay cut for high demand professions. (This is the same reason why regulatory capture is such a problem – we'd be much better off giving the SEC staff 400% raises than having them make decisions about likely future employers when they get tired of below-market pay) If you do manage to make it that far, you can do some interesting things. I know the CFPB runs a far more modern IT shop because they were able to start without years of legacy-blinkered culture and hire skilled staff directly rather than relying on contractors through a procurement process which basically legally binds you to the least functional waterfall process. It'd be really good for the entire government if that became the model in the future – hire good people, give them autonomy to get projects done and responsibility to deliver.

al2o3cr 13y ago

"“I used to chase people for months — literally — for one signature on one piece of paper. You want to talk about an egregious waste of taxpayer money?” recalled one worker who left the mine recently and declined to be named because of fears of retribution." And of course if they didn't chase down every signature, we'd be reading an otherwise identical article from WaPo whining about "wastefraudandabuse".

rodgerd 13y ago
Exactly. I work in a government town (although not for the government), and the fear of "gotcha" is the single biggest inhibiting factor for getting things done. There are hordes of politically-motivated eyes waiting for the smallest chink in your armour, so they can blow it into a huge story. It literally doesn't matter what people try to do - if there are checks and balances it's "waste"; if they try to do something innovative and interesting it's "recklessness" and so on. The people have the government departments they deserve.
- bdunbar 13y ago
  > The people have the government departments they deserve. Yeah - and they inflict it on the rest of us.
- Aloha 13y ago
  Yeah, I second this, I've learned to phrase questions in such a way when dealing with government employees, where they can give approval, without having to either say yes or no - in other words phrase it in such a way that they dont have to say no - No with the government is the default answer.

rayiner 13y ago

> The root of the problem, he said, was that the system had trouble synthesizing information from so many sources and calculations based on so many laws. So the gist of the article is that we pay these folks to do things with paper because the computer based replacements aren't flexible enough to handle the problem.

revelation 13y ago
I can certainly imagine how that went. A monstrous Java Enterprise deployment, with thousands of classes and many more interfaces, and illustrous names like IRetireeAnuniatingSpecialCaseBenefitCalculatorSourceSinkBean. Maybe the whole problem is too complex to be able to solve it in one go, but thats why we abstract complexity away and return to solving the simple things, such as reliable digital document storage. Just digitize papers as they come in or are retrieved from "cold storage", and over time you have enough in the working set to get most of these poor people out of the mine and into some sunlight, jesus...

incision 13y ago

I'm painfully familiar with some of this. My favorite example of just how dysfunctional it all is was an agency which made a small fuss about how they were modernizing by allowing online job applications 10+ years ago. Behind the scenes the applications were simply emailed to a shared mailbox then printed out and re-entered by hand into the actual position management system. The position management system was so dated and overloaded that the folks entering data had learned how long they could expect to wait (measured in minutes to tens of minutes) when moving between a given set of screens. They would submit one screen then work on something else. Eventually, the agency spent an enormous amount of money implementing some combination of systems from SAP to consolidate / replace everything. Now the same folks who were retyping resumes are cut and pasting them into a series of webforms and emailing around spreadsheets of all the information that the system lacks forms for. Hiring managers who had little or no input on requirements for new system don't even log in, they request printouts from HR. --- Having seen things like this play out a few times now I have a few ideas about what could help one of these projects actually succeed: * Generate or at least inform requirements with honest information from people at the ground level. Those people toiling away filling up manilla folders and doing data entry know the actual process. The farther up the chain you go the story will move away from reality toward what's effectively nothing more than the way things are supposed to work. Problem is, the layers of management don't want to allow that kind of access and will retaliate against their subordinates for being honest. Also, those low-level people are likely aware enough to know that they're talking themselves out of a job. I think the former requires a powerful and attentive enough personality leading the effort to simply bulldoze the managers. I wonder if the latter can't be addressed by buying everyone out with generous severance or early retirement. It would puts a cap on the cost of these broken jobs and processes rather than continuing to cycle people ad money through them. * As a rule, the technical and procurement staff of these agencies aren't competent to generate requirements or evaluate what's produced when dealing with outside contractors and implementers. At the same time, the agencies don't pay enough or move fast enough to maintain a competent internal staff. This is really hard. Hiring outside experts seems to actually work against the goal as they will invariably work more for some particular vendor than the agency. Big companies absolutely collude and actively work to hold down smaller competitors so "competitive" anything doesn't really work. One idea I've been kicking around is a sort of a open source template for government system/project requirements. It would be a easy to follow "test suite" which proposals could be compared against. It would raise flags or fail plans and terms which don't meet the standard of contributors with domain knowledge. I'd like to write more on this, but I've got a few things to handle this evening.

Mz 13y ago

As a minimum, I think they could scan papers into a document system. We had this when I was in insurance. It still required review by a person but most files were digital. This basic thing already exists. I don't understand why it is not being used for the federal retirement system. Insurance is probably just as bad as the retirement system: Policies have to comply with state laws in fifty different states and there are all kinds of SNAFU things that go on because of it.

lambda 13y ago

So, I've had a tendency to roll my eyes at the "agile" movement, and how much faith people put in it that it must be the best thing since slice bread. I've frequently said that a lot of it is just common sense, some of it is just needless process that just happens to be different, not worse or better, than traditional processes, and there are a couple of good points that agile methodologies have brought about. But then I look at something like this, and I realize that common sense isn't necessarily so common in a big bureaucracy like this. They have tried three times to automate this, and failed each time? They've spent 7 years on one attempt, with absolutely nothing to show for it? I can't imaging going seven years without some kind of incremental release that you can use to gauge whether it's working or not. I mean, why do they seem to think that it's necessary to solve the whole problem in one big, opaque project? You would think they could do it incrementally, automating the easiest pieces or automating one step of the process while leaving a fallback for manual processing for the more complex cases or the other steps.

ams6110 13y ago
The counterintuitive thing that many people don't understand about government software projects is that failure is the norm. There are relatively few "big" consultancies that win these projects, and their numbers include Oracle, IBM, Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp, SAIC, Booz-Allen Hamilton, and a few others. Their goal in government procurements is not to deliver working software, it's just to win the contract, and then staff it with as many people as they can. We've known since The Mythical Man-Month and other books such as Peopleware that high staffing levels does not help most software projects, in fact it hurts them. But if the project fails, which most do, they all still get paid. And they will still win other contracts. Delivery of working software is just not high on the priority list--winning contracts and staffing them is. There are all the usual problems with big software projects, and add to it that most government procurement is still based on the experience of building physical things (jet fighters, ships, highways, etc.) which really doesn't work for software. But the big reason governments spend millions of dollars and waste years of time on software projects is because the contractors are not incented to deliver working software. In fact their incentives are to deliver failed projects, so that they can bid on them again.

evolve2k 13y ago

'Work in Progress' is a key form of muda or waste in lean philosophy. The key is to eliminate waste coming into the system. Employees need to be empowered to, send straight back incomplete paperwork and to update the forms & instructions coming into the system that are contributing to the waste. Considering the gravitational mass of all these processes I would work on bringing lean manufacturing approaches in first before deriving a computer based solution. As per all these things its going to take a lot of leadership to drive any type of real change. Ref: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing

nostromo 13y ago

I'm both horrified and comforted. "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." -Eugene McCarthy

drdeadringer 13y ago

> "What is modern?" Oh, well, let's not be too hasty in becoming efficient and up-to-date here. Obviously, having a sneaker-net is fast enough for you simply because the name has the term "net" in it. One of my old employers has a few vintage DEC VAXes if you want to start out on saving on your pencil budget. I can confirm, though that the "chase the physical signature" game is still alive and well. /shiver I would, however, like to be the pizza guy with a security clearance. Employment while it lasts :D

hindsightbias 13y ago

For $55M a year, this is cheap. The mistake was to repeatedly spend 100's of millions to try to automate it. Go take a 35 yr old SF171 or such and scan, OCR and verify it. Get back to me when you can do that cheaply 10M times.

acchow 13y ago
A 61-day processing period is not cheap for the person waiting for money. You want to digitize old forms for retired people? This is entirely the wrong approach. New data should be in digital form. Not even all new data, just one vertical at a time - new payroll data, new business expense data, new insurance claims data, etc. This shards the work into tractable, testable, measurable units. There will be a (long) period when processing retirement forms will need to pull data from both analog and digital sources. That time will eventually pass, and the analog gradually phased out.
- hindsightbias 13y ago
  Investing 100's of millions into a parallel system that won't yield much until a good portion of your future retirees are in it (and all 50 diferrent federal agencies records are integrated in) is a hard sell in any universe. In the meantime, that system will obsolesce in 5 years and you'll have to redo it all again.
- watt 13y ago
  Are you aware of time periods involved, though? When you say "new data" do you understand that this new data will only become pertinent in about 50 years, when the employee that just came in to system, retires. 50 years later. And meanwhile, you are processing paperwork for people that entered the system 50 years ago: on today, 1964. (Ok, maybe closer 40 years, but the point is the very long storage time.) Even if all new data is digital today, what about 50 years later, how easy will it be to use digital files that were generated 50 years earlier. What if file formats change every 10 years. Then 50 years on, you got 5 different file formats you must be able to work with.
jpatokal 13y ago

FollowSteph3 13y ago

I wrote an article about this having lived through it for a shilled called Why a hammer costs $5000? And it really all comes down to motivations being very badly lined up trying versus just doing the same. The link is: http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost-5000/ http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost...

ballard 13y ago

This is how I imagine this department operates: http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY http://youtu.be/fKRV40LZSuY (Brazil)