Struggling With Major IT Projects

Ant writes "This article discusses the poor track record of IT projects undertaken by the U.S. government, and says experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees. 'There are very few success stories,' said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer (CIO) at the Pentagon. 'Failures are very common, and they've been common for a long time.'... Seen on Blue's News."

Comments

Interesting you should use that example.

[ashitaka]

North American ATM's can't now do half of what Japanese ATMs could do 10 years ago.

-Work with coins.
-Dispense any random amount not just multiples of 20's.
-Transfer between differnt branc accounts.
-Carry out wire transfers.

There are probably valid reasons for this but I have always felt hamstrung by local ATMs since moving back.

Re:I concur

[QuantumG]

Wow, what managers do you have? Every IT company I have ever worked at has had a "hands off" approach. This basically means that the engineers get paid to post on Slashdot, drink the free soda and play video games all day. Sure occasionally someone would get asked how new feature X was coming along, and maybe that'd have to fire up their favourite editor for 15 minutes and do some real work but that didn't happen that often.

Now if I was running a company that did software development I'd go through employees like 1.25 ltr bottles of coke. Basically I'd make sure every employee had tasks assigned to them and I'd monitor their progress by their CVS checkins. I know how much code is "hard work" and how much code is "slacking off". An employee would get say, 3 warnings, then they are out the door. Attempting to cheat the system is instant dismissal.

Of course, I'm sure people have started companies like this themselves. Then they quickly discovered that they didn't have enough work for the number of employees they had hired, so rather than fire the employees they just hoped they'd get more work in the future and never did. Or they just got lazy in their monitoring. Or they really just have no idea that monitoring is necessary.

FBI, here ya' go

[Tablizer]

For the terrorist-tracking system, just get a big-ass Oracle RDBMS, typical add/change/delete/query-by-example/ACL user-interface tools, Crystal Reports, and put in the following schema:

suspects // table name
----------
suspectID // auto-gen
priority // Priority risk assigned to suspect
suspectReasonCode // reason for being a suspect
suspectFirstName
suspectMiddle
suspectLastName

suspectAliases
--------------
aliasID //auto-gen
suspectRef // foriegn key to "suspects" table
aliasFirst
aliasMiddle
aliasLast
usedFromDt // used from date
usedToDt

suspectLocations
----------
locationID // auto-gen
suspectRef
locatFromDt // start date at location
locatToDt
locType (residence, airport, hotel, etc.)
longitude
latitude
(insert typical address columns...)

fieldNotes
-------------
suspectRef
agentRef // ID of agent authoring note
locationRef
encounterRef // if applicable (see below)
textNote // text note for small stuff
docRef // document reference (such as MS-Word file name)

encounters // meetings or close encounters between multiple suspects
------------
encntrID // auto-gen encounter ID
encntrDescript
encntrDt // date of encounter
locationRef // foriegn key to "suspectLocations" table

encounterParticipants
-----------
encntrRef
suspectRef
fromDateTime
toDateTime

I'm done. Now where's my 30 mil?