3 ms·
My friend has been a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the last year. Basically people can't get things done because they are being stonewalled by the old-gua
by TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
My friend has been a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the last year.
Basically people can't get things done because they are being stonewalled by the old-guard in the various departments they've been tasked with reforming. There are outside vendors with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts on the line, and they don't want those contracts to be cancelled by implementing commonsense new technology reforms.
My friend described a process in one government department where digital documents were received, were printed, were then physically mailed to a back office site, and then manually entered into a system by typing. The contract for the scanning was worth millions. The contract for the back-end was worth millions. People's jobs depended on there being this whole useless exercise. Nothing could be reformed.
I think its important that we have optimism, but nothing short of sledgehammer and mass layoffs of government employees and contractors is going to improve government.
- iandanforth 11y agoName names please. Perhaps it's naive, but I imagine that if we have a specific instance to work with we're much more likely to be able to force change.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoDon't even need to name names. Give me a department/division name so I can start firing up MuckRock with FOIA requests.
- TheMagicHorsey 11y agoThe problem is people can't go public with this stuff. They will be blacklisted from ever working in government again. And these are regulatory agencies that can make trouble for you in the private sector world too. This is why I'm being so vague. I could actually give you specific details, but then my friend would be identified. My friend said even with the small level of reforming he was trying to do, people stopped inviting him to meetings--because he was embarrassing with the way he was saying the Emperor has No Clothes, with respect to the processes being used. Imagine a tech company where everyone basically has tenure, and promotions are based on how long you've been warming your seat. Now bake that organization for 50 years. That is your govt. IT department.
- mkempe 11y agoSurely all these amazing people who were pretty much hired directly by Obama himself can fearlessly go talk to him about that. Or is he simply throwing hundreds of them into a volcano, knowing that nothing lasting and significant will be achieved?
- TheMagicHorsey 11y agoI think you misunderstand how much access to the President even high level techies in the government have. He has an enormous amount of demands on his time, and limited waking hours and political capital to spend. Reforming Fed. tech is not one of his priorities.
- mkempe 11y agoWhat you say is not the gist of the article nor how Obama, supposedly, recruited them.
- TheMagicHorsey 11y agoWhat I'm requesting is that you don't believe the article hype. Of course, don't take me at my word. Wait a year, or 2 years, or whatever you think is a reasonable time to wait for results ... and then check the USPTO website, or the FAA website, or the BIS website ... whatever your favorite govt. IT portal is, and see if its better. Better yet, ask a friend in government if things have gotten better in his/her department.
- dnesting 11y agoDon't assume that every piece of dysfunction you see can't be fixed. Many of these systems are mind-bogglingly complex and can't be replaced in one go. It seems entirely reasonable to me for a system undergoing modernization to have a modern piece interacting with the user feeding an old paper-based process behind it. That's obviously not the desired end goal but it seems like a perfectly reasonable intermediate one.