UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos

crlove writes "LA Times reports, 'The University of California today won its hard-fought bid to continue operating the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, beating back a challenge from a Lockheed Corp.-University of Texas team to run the nuclear weapons research facility... For months, the New Mexico laboratory had been shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"

Comments

The Real Story?

[Quirk]

If you're interested, Doug Roberts, a computer scientist who retired from Los Alamos run a blog, titled, LANL: The Real Story", further, the same site has a page given over to Running list of wasteful activities at LANL.

Part of the deal that had my parents paying for my education was an undergraduate, course load heavy in Economics, Commmerce and Business Law. Having the tools to gain some perspective in how large organizations run, it's instructive to look into the internals of a giant, once prestigious organization like Los Alamos and try to trace the systemic flaws that led to it's current plight.

Re:The Real Story?

[sane?]

The problems detailed are the same problems that are repeated time and again in all government organisations, all over the world. In total the waste is probably in the trillions. At heart the problem is trust and paperwork. Because everyone is so scared to actually trust people, they create masses of paperwork, hierarchy and approvals to make them feel like they are 'managing risk'. Result is "the answer is no, now what's the question?"

Upshot is either things don't happen, or people go 'around the system' to make things happen. Sometimes that comes back and bites the organisation on the arse.

Fixing it isn't done by changing the captain of the Titanic, its done by clearing out all the existing processes, all the paperwork, most of the arts graduates claiming to be managers and only adding them back where they can demonstrate real value - and then only in the simplest possible fashion. 'Managing risk' as value is a red flag that suggested solution is a bad one.

A good half way house is to insist those that ask for a form to be filled in provide the real money out of their budgets for the time taken to do that work, rather than hiding the pain and cost. At least that way people think before implementing new processes.

The thing I find interesting is exactly the same issues crop up again and again, but the trendy management textbooks never see fit to address these real issues with real solutions - instead focusing on 'enhancing your synagy'. Maybe its because MBAs are at the root the reason these management failures crop up in the first place.

Nice

[Cmdr_earthsnake]

Nice, a university running a city, good universities like the one described are often full of bright, mature, and great working people bursting ith inspiration.

Why not let them unleash their glowing intelligence on a city and help improve the management of the laboratory for science?

Other labs

[WindBourne]

The postings are interesting. It appears that other labs are being grabbed by the original university that managed it AND a large company. For example, BWXT teams with University of Chicago for Argonne Lab. This makes me wonder if this is the wholesale sell-off of our R&D labs to private enterprise. IOW, will these companies now have unfettered access to all the ideas that comes from these labs and will declare them their own? I only mention this because of the large system support contract that GWB awarded Accenture (a company of crooks and inepts) a HUGE contract that takes place overseas. They not only pull the jobs away but much of the code is now being done elsewhere. IIRC, Accenture will have partial ownership as well as will be in control of a large number of federal systems.

Wrong UC

[gearmonger]

UC = University of Cincinnati, at least per the domain registry. www.uc.edu

Re:Wrong UC

[tafinucane]

Berkeley is NE of San Francisco. Perhaps you were thinking of Stanford?

Bidding Govennrment Contracts Sucks

[N8F8]

The other side of the story not being told is that the loser just spent a crapload of money putting together a detailed award proposal and probably never had a real chance in the first place. I've been on that side of the deal too. When you bid this stuff it is hard to know if this is an honest offer unless you (illegally) have someone on the inside feeding you information. At lot of big contracts, especially government ones, have outcomes decided before the bidding even starts.

Certain it's not the uncertainty ...

[beer_maker]

Let me start with a Arguement from Authority - You should listen to me, because I work at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) so I know all about this stuff ... LOL.

But seriously, my opinion is this: Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:

1. You ignore the issue of scale - the Labs' budgets are so big that most day-to-day purchasing isn't affected. It's the things like not replacing the million-dollar photo spectrometer every year, or not buying updated software (I still have to support a few WinNT/98/ME systems because the controller's software was written to run only on that platform, and we can't afford to buy a whole new electron microsocope.*)
2. The "Mad September Purchasing Rush" still happens, but most funds are allocated quarterly (or more often) so we've never had to wait 6 months - the wait time seems comparable to what I remember from the private sector (though they ARE longer than those at the dot-bomb I once worked for.)
3. And we DO miss out on training that we would like, but not because of direct budget uncertainty. The problem here is that everybody in our organization draws against the same pot of training money, and when it's gone, it's gone.

No, the biggest management problem is balancing "Security" and "Efficiency". If it's easy to do, it's probably not secure, and vice versa. And the security side wins most decisions (which is usually a GoodThing(tm), given the stuff people play with at the Labs.) Nobody MEANS to cause a problem, but they break one little rule ... and it gets easier to do it that way, or it encourages somebody else to break one little rule too ... and as you say, "things can get kind of out of hand."

(*And nobody seems to want to write such software for OSX/Linux/etc ... why is that?)