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Who's Controlling Our Vital Information Systems?
HangingChad writes "Gary Lyndaker talks about Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite; about how our information infrastructure is increasingly being sold off to the low bidder. Contracting in state and federal government is rampant, leaving more and more of our nation's vital information in the hands of contractors, many of whom have their own agenda and set of rules. From the article: 'Over 25 years, as an information systems developer, manager, and administrator in both state and private organizations, I have increasingly come to the conclusion that we are putting our state's operations at risk and compromising the trust of the people of our state by outsourcing core government functions.' I've seen the same thing in my years in government IT, ironically much of it as a contractor. My opinion is this is a dangerous trend that needs to be reversed. We're being fleeced while being put at risk."
Who's on first!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Guess what, this is exactly how the military has been run for decades. What makes a contractor any better or worse at managing information than the government itself?
Unfortunately this is the way our American gov't operates: Bottom-line management style approach to everything with only the lowest budget in mind. It's really no different than people in society who try to live and act like rockstar's on a McDonald's budget. FTFA, IT, in particular, is in shambles because the mass employee attrition related to budget woes. So maybe you get the "diamond-in-the-rough" person who picked up the in's and out's of the infrastructure and singlely-handed administers the whole network themselves, you'd be ignorant to think he's going to stick any long when anything remotely better in the private sector surfaces again. Just like any place, Gov't IT creates their own single point of failure because they 1) Won't purchase what you need to succeed because they are under the esteemed impression that they pay you to come up with enterprise solutions out of thin-air, and 2) charge the gov't 1.5x the salary than they are paying the contractors to do it. You don't build tenure and stability that way, folks.
Budget strapped State/County/Municipal I.T. organizations do not employ the best and brightest and their budgeting process is simplified by off loading functionality at a constant fixed cost. It is with this in mind that outsourcing firms market services to them. Once that contract is signed... usually with language that gives the contractor significant leeway and discretion to torque their service model so as to maximize profitability... the problem is off of everyone's mind. I.T. management is free to focus elsewhere, the contractor is free to find new worlds to conquer, and no one gives a damn if the process delivers what was promised until it's too late.
Then it's off to Court you go where only the public loses. :(
Q: Who controls the vital information systems? A: The botnets? :o
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Hard: building a top notch IT organization.
Easy: paying somebody to hide the problems, firing them when the problems can't be ignored, then hiring another contractor who does exactly the same thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is an interesting debate going on world wide about how best to manage privatization.
Many successful examples follow the example of government regulating the private sector, but the actual provision of the services being private.
Just as an example, it seems education in Scandinavian countries is provided like that.
So why is that bad for IT? It could be a good thing.
...without due diligence and a complete lack of knowledge of what is necessary, does that mean it's absolved of all blame when something goes wrong? If the government makes a series of stupid decisions with regard to contractors, it doesn't mean they will suddenly be able to do the work better themselves, any more than f I chose a restaurant poorly, it means I'll suddenly be able to make delicious meals at home.
And before anyone can say "businesses are only in it for the money" -- sure, that is almost always true, but the government doesn't even have *that* incentive. Seriously, why would a government worker try to stay within a budget when they can cry for more tax revenue, and why would they bother trying something new that might work better or be cheaper when there is no reward and they have a captive audience? Government workers are not paragons of virtue compared to those in the private sector, they are the same type of people with a bigger budget and less accountability. Until you can actually sit down and list the requirements for a particular project and then align the incentives with the results you want, you are going to have crap outcomes, whether you outsource a service or bring it in-house.
And good riddance.
The contractors do a great job, pay well and don't leave the taxpayers on the hook for an underfunded pension plan.
And no amount of union screaming will stop it. At the federal, state and local levels, government is INSOLVENT.
So I expect to see more of this. And I for one welcome it.
The Government does not pay all that well (and previously less well). You are talking about large networks, that are very complicated. As a result, you do not have a whole lot of government staff with experience to run a network that is that complicated.
I work in a very small (5K users) government (federal) office. I have to deal with 12 windows domains, 11 Political groups, and offer support to all Regional Admins, and departmental admins - as well as dealing with a help desk which has been told "we don't investigate error logs."
Unfortunately, some of the government staff can't find their ***es with both hands. This is because 12 years ago, the government paid much less than the contractors. Good technical people could earn twice a much contracting a working for the government. Those people are still contracting (mostly), and are the ones that you would want in the government running the show. The people who have "more senior" positions in gvt now? They are largely the ones who couldn't get the better paid contracting jobs, and state: Helpdesk personnel should not be investigating application event logs.
Furthermore, this is also the case for many large businesses: They outsourced the tech support years ago (cheaper); most users get someone in india to change passwords, while sr. staff get concierge service. Those large businesses have similar issues as well: but they have an explicit 2-tier service system.
It's been going on for years, but I don't see any way to rectify it: especially as the job listings still seem to be opaque, and difficult to decode.
Personally I think the biggest problem in government organizations is the lack of effective leadership. They don't run things like the real world works and they aren't usually willing to pay enough money to recruit talent that can.
Firstly, the notion of hiring private companies to do something (or simply letting them continue to do it, e.g. shopworkers and car repairers) rather than a government doing the same, is a basic politlcal and philosophical question where no "proofs" as to what is best can be found. Both of the alternatives could be argued to have both advantages and disadvantages, and lead to slightly different situations. So the only thing people can do is make rather empty claims and point to empirical studies which may or may not apply universally. Which pretty much means that whoever shouts loudest to put their ideas in people's minds wins.
Secondly, if you are inclined towards private companies filling government functions but have a problem with poor standards, the nearest solution would be to have higher standards when you judge contracts.
Of course, higher standards leads to problems in itself. For example, if you are barring companies that haven't been in business for at least 10 years, you would in many cases basically lay the groundwork for competing monopolies (no 'new entrants' would threaten the established companies). Which may or may not be worth it.
Well, my interaction with my state's operations have made me increasingly come to the conclusion that I would trust a rowdy herd of poorly trained chimpanzees over the state's employees. So bring on the contractors, I say.
Ted Turner
and Rupert Murdoch
I have spent over a dozen years working on various federal government systems. I have seen things that would make your head spin.
But I see no evidence that if contractors were phased of of the Missouri IT systems that things would necessarily get better. Sure the author mentions the grade of 'A' from Governing Magazine, but this is not a heavy hitting name in the IT world, I would not be surprised if a good part of this 'A' grade is because the state has been aggressive with outsourcing of IT.
Outsourcing it s not an excuse for management to not be involved in these process. It does not matter if work is being done by employees or contractors, it must be managed, a failure to do so will lead to bad situations. What we have here appears to be an inability to manage, changing the color of the badges for those doing the work is not likely to resolve this.
I could be totally wrong and often am, but the voices in my head say the /. spin on this speaks to working conditions more then management philosophy.
Many of us have done early-career stints in larger organizations where we learned to our horror that technical experts are viewed as evil twits, not assets. That's why so many of us nerds of a certain age walk around with pinched pained expressions. Caused by thoughts like, why doesn't anything make any SENSE? You would think, working in technology and all, being a wizard would bring with it a certain amount of status and security. It just doesn't seem to be the case.
It's not so much the sub vs in-house question as the management vs expert question that always seems to get answered in a predictably bad way. What's even worse, former geeks who grow up and get into decision-making positions are often i.m.experience the worst offenders, becoming the most vicious defenders of the bottom-line view of things, lording it over the rest of us who see our jobs as being to tease Mother Nature into behaving long enough to do something useful. And she's a fickle old witch.
The big organizations who do seem to do some technology ok, the GEs, the HPs, the IBMs, well as far as I can tell they accomplish it by being practically Darwinian. They have their research chairs sure, but they succeed in business by absolutely grinding middle management into powder so that the survivors are just about sociopaths.
I don't know, I guess in this phase of human development if a person wants to do something with love and passion it has to be a hobby. A few lucky ones might get paid for it. Everybody else chases bucks.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
The bottom line is that the operation of a country's IT infrastructure is a thankless job. There is (literally) no financial incentive to do a good job. There is almost no incentive whatsoever to do a good job; some might argue that reputation and respect are valid incentives but there's not much of that in the government IT world. Build a system where success isn't recognized and you're sure to have failure overall. Why would anyone work for no (significant) money, no respect, no long term benefits, no challenge even (it's not like government systems are cutting edge)?
Pointing the fingers at contractors is simply extraneous information. Good teams do good work no matter who they work for.
Fixing the problems is a non-trivial task. Hell, identifying all the problems is a non-trivial task. The only trivial task is the too common announcement of "oh my god, the world is falling, our country won't survive this apocalyptic disaster that's brewing in our infrastructure".
The reason this crazy system works at all is that it's a distributed system. Failure in one section doesn't lead to failure in other sections. Just like most natural systems (think of the way a river flows, often in separate channels) our infrastructure adapts to problems as needed.
It's interesting that people predict massive problems despite there never being any massive problems. For example, name a single infrastructure event that impacted the daily lives of every American. Katrina, which wiped out a big section of the country for several weeks didn't impact the Northeast, Northwest, etc. in the least (aside from non-stop news coverage). FAA flight control screw ups are probably the most significant failures and note that it's a centralized system.
Government systems need to be operated as distributed systems, managed by many different people, because that is the primary security control protecting us from catastrophic failure. Government or contractor management has nothing to do with this, both options can do well, both can do poorly.
Here is a radical idea that meshes with the US Constitution: maybe the government should NOT be in all this business in the first place? Then it wouldn't be an issue.
ARIA will soon be in control!
The original poster wrote- "My opinion is this is a dangerous trend that needs to be reversed. We're being fleeced while being put at risk."
The problem is government. Government and mismanagement have gone together for at least the last 50+ years. To think that government employees would perform better than contractors is pure fantasy.
We transfer liabilities and with some clever arrangements, can still make some money on the process.
We are being controlled by Corporate Evil because we pay them to control us. They are ordered to pwn us.
Isn't that great? Thank the pigs in the farm.
is controlled by Lori Beth Denberg.
We may argue about how info is sold, but when somebody, or a nation, can get to it, just by the backdoors in the hardware and software, then THEY OWN IT.
also are in control of company data also included in this article?
Banks, credit card companys, medical instutions?
Everything we do that is recorded by IT is controled by contractors. The lowest bidder.
I think the article completley misses the point.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
... and Slashdot acknowledged it earlier. It's the end run, by law enforcement agencies and national intelligence, around the 4th amendment.
See: Fourth Party Data Brokers
There's an idealistic view that people who work in "public service" should be willing and able to operate ethically and measure their decisions in a constitutional context. This notwithstanding the perception that legislators with even greater power are beholden to their constituents in a similar manner to the mythical obligation that the primary metric of corporate management should be the short-term, bottom-line view of Wall Street.
Assuming the above is an accurate depiction of American values, why should anyone be surprised that the governments' information assets (about us and the operations of our government) are managed with any ethical integrity whatsoever? Most MBA's will tell you, that cost reduction, as much as anything else, is a primary concern, even though we all 'know' through the continual barrage of advertising, that quality solutions require greater expenditure.
The easiest way to see how this paradox of low-cost vs. quality plays out it is to listen to the Tea-Baggers who chant the mantra, "government that governs least governs best." Then compare this general lack of critical thinking to the contrary evidence, efew.g. the total failure of the many multi-billion dollar IS debacles in the Intelligence black budgets, FEMA's performance in the context of New Orleans (after the Bush-Conservative gutting of its expertise)or the bankruptcy of Orange County (as a harbinger of the current meltdown/swindle/bailout of the investment banking sector), as a few examples.
The fundamental questions arise: how to do define or measure quality, and how do you convince anyone that spending more money on managing information is logical. As ever, in the absence of a clear definition of the specific goals necessary to effect a long-range planing process, it's difficult to determine much, other than discontent.
I'm not that sure about this. I work for an IT contractor, and if you try to do a good job you'll run into a conflict of interest, sooner or later. Typical scenario is that the sales guys from your company want to sell the customer something he doesn't really need - and then you get asked about your opinion on whether he should buy it or not.
a) Stab the customer in the back, telling him he really needs to buy this
b) Stab your employer in the back, telling the customer that he doesn't really need it
c) Try to give a nonsensical answer that doesn't help the customer
d) Refuse to comment
e) Tell the customer he doesn't x, and instead should buy y.
Which one is the right choice? Of course you can always construct another option like talking to your sales guys, but this might not work if his bonus is on the line. Techies don't get bonuses, so they don't care about selling stuff.
I usually take option e), because there's always something you should do. But it's not a perfect solution, since you're basically saying your sales guys are incompetent and they should buy something else.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 probably comes close.
Some of the fault can be laid squarely at whoever wrote the original contract. One of the contracts in the UK that's currently just starting to make the press is notable because the consultants managing the process (why would you let a consultant manage the process?! Consultants *consult*, dummy! Not a dig at consultants, but the fool who handed over control of the entire process to a third party...) are being paid 10% of the procurement cost of the contract as a bonus.
Yes, you read that right, they're effectively being *told* to buy the most expensive thing possible, with somebody else's money. And, as an added bonus, the system they've chosen (at an estimated 5 times the cost of one of the losers - whom they didn't actually permit to bid) will require months of (paid, of course) work from the consultants concerned to get it to work. I'm in the wrong line of work, really I am...
Semper en excreta sumus solum profundum
The other perspective is that we are handing off critical and complex systems to those more better able to handle them due to experience and training. Further, as any government employee will tell you, you can't rely on the politicians to understand why IT needs as much money as we do. They often fail to understand that if they want x, they need to pay y. By outsourcing the operation, the costs are better controlled ( something the bean counters love ), and interruption to the service is less likely.
Not that the OP doesn't have a good point, he does. But it really does make more sense to let specialized companies handle the complex operations.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Most enterprises just hire the cheapest possible labor and call the expensive guys/girls only when something breaks and the cheap labor can't fix it. If it works for them this way, and if it's cheaper just to declare bankruptcy on a system failure vs. doing it right in the first place, why would they change their ways?
stuff |
That's pretty objectionable alright. When you sell something it is supposed to go to the high bidder.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is (literally) no financial incentive to do a good job... Pointing the fingers at contractors is simply extraneous information. Good teams do good work no matter who they work for.
Well there are issues of incentive that aren't immediately obvious, and who you work for does matter. If you work for the government directly, there's a sense in which your stated job is basically to make the government run better, whereas when you work for an outside contractor, your stated job is to make money for the contractor. That seeps into your head and affects the way you do things.
I'm not saying that contractors can't be helpful or even that it can't be a better route to go, but it's not quite a simple issue. Contractors where you're giving them steady work aren't too bad, but short-term consultants are the worst. Their incentive is often to get things working long enough to get out the door with a check; beyond that, it can actually be in their interest to have things break now and then so you call them back in. No thanks.
I've learned over the years that laziness can be a terrific motivator in IT. That's right. Laziness. It sounds weird if you don't understand true laziness, but what you have to remember is it takes more work to support a system that isn't working well than it is to support a system that's well designed and well maintained. I remember learning that as a helpdesk tech, realizing that I could spend 5 minutes every day fixing the same problem, or I could spend 5 hours in one day fixing the problem properly, and then never have to fix it again.
So one of the problems with outside contractors is, depending on the exact deal, laziness might not be a big motivator. Contractors and consultants might be just as happy to keep all those 5-minute-a-day problems, because fixing things properly might mean the end of their contract.
Let's give the new users a good example of how to write a realtroll, rather than the rubbish that passes for trolling most of the time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All four examples from TFA have the common theme of one outsourced group does the development, and a different group does the maintenance, resulting in loss of institutional and system knowledge. This is a flaw in outsourcing approach. The solitication should be for development and system lifetime maintenance, with contractual penalties for failure to respond to or fix problems.
Option b is the correct answer. Option b means that the next time your customer really does need something expensive, they will me more likely to let you sell it to them. Option b is not stabbing your company in the back, it's stabbing your sales guy in the back. Option b increases your customer's trust in your company, which improves your company's long-term relationship with the customer and increases the total amount that your company will get from that customer over the course of that relationship.
Quite frankly, it is your sales guy who is working against your company's interest by chasing short-term profits at the expense of good customer relations and he or she absolutely deserves to be stabbed in the back. If possible, fire the sales guy and send a written apology, complete with the information that the sales guy has been fired, to your customer's CTO or CIO.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Is that ultimately, disabling an in-house government operation actually winds up raising overall costs in the long run. Initially, yeah, the venture capitalists that fund the privatization give the feds a pretty good deal, but contrary to all the babble about short sightedness, these folks are in it for the long haul. They bide their time, and let the inevitable churn of politics and government action mean a greater demand for services, which they provide.
Seriously, right now we are spending record peacetime levels on defense, and what do we have, but only 1700 fighter aircraft for the USAF, not even 300 ships for the USN, and the whole time the contractors wave around "complexity" as if it is a magic bullet to allow brute force engineering that costs a fortune, cost overruns and bad designs papered over in "blocks".
I point at the F-22, as exhibit A, the littoral combat ship, the next generation aircraft carrier. All of this stuff is, well, pretty feature rich, but, the F-22 needs a thousand people a pop to get it off the ground, which is insane, the LCS is now too expensive to be the disposable combat vessel it was supposed to be, and the next generation aircraft carrier is insane.
When you are down to just -one- possible vendor for the government, at that point, you almost have to just nationalize the business.
This is my sig.
That's how you see it, that's how i see it, but it's not how the sales dept or our CEO for that matter will see it. I suspect it's pretty much the same for other companies.
That's what The People get for buying in to that Reagan-esque Reinventing Government shell game. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of...what? Well, it used to be Money, but now there's no money so how about, oh...Entertainment? Yea, that's it. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Entertainment.
Regarding... Bottom-line management style approach to everything with only the lowest budget in mind.
You're just kidding, right? I actually wish there was some truth to that but it's just patently false.
Govt "management style" includes petty power plays to protect their little fiefdoms at all costs including inpenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy with endless and meaningless rules. The more rules you make, the more powerful you are.
They measure their personal success in terms of the size of their budget- it has nothing to do with what you actually accomplish. The more you spend the more important you are. And you never, never want to end the year with any budget unspent because that will present a problem in getting more budget the next year. To extend your power the goal is to ask for way more budget than you could possible need then add some to that. Appearances of holding down costs are made as some of the budget requests are cut but the game has been played and the end result is anything but cost conscious.
In choosing the winning bid the contractor with the highest bid often wins. This is because they are with the in crowd having developed a reputation with govt bureaucrats. The bureaucrats are not interested in cost but in the safest, least risky route where they protect their power by doing business with a known quantity like contractors they've worked with before. If things go bad the bureaucrats protect themselves with finger pointing and the contractors are impersonal and handy. But if the sly contractor accepts the finger pointing and actually helps his client politically, he'll be on track to win future bids. The contractors learn to game the system and become experts by learning how to craft winning bids. Crafting winning bids becomes more important than performing on contracts won. One strategy is to make a lot of high bids knowing you will lose many but one will pass. Sometimes the contractors actually get busy with contracts won but they are still asked to put in a bid on a bureaucrat's meaningless pet project anyway. Since they are already busy they just submit an outrageously high bid in an effort to lose the bid so they don't get overextended... Then they actually win it. That's when the contractor hires a bunch of inexperienced people and starts throwing warm bodies at and ever increasing and unmanageable bunch of projects.
I know this from personal experience having learned how to game the system. I made a lot of money with winning IT bids and networkings with other contractors, comparing notes and laughing at and ridiculing our govt clients. This experience goes way back to when I was a teenager working for my Dad who was a construction contractor. I particularly remember one govt contract to put a roof on a 2 car garage. We were given a printed manual explaining how to do the job that was over 100 pages. The man hours spent to prepare this manual were obviously greater than the man hours to actually do the job. We were told to use this tapered, specially machined insulation which served no practicle purpose but was incredibly expensive. For the gravel on top of the roof we were forced to use expensive indoor flowerpot gravel instead of the typical industrial roofing gravel. It was great for me as a teenager because the govt required that my Dad pay me and all unskilled labor an outrageously high hourly rate way more than would even be paid to a journeyman carpenter in the real world. Curiously the journeyman rates were only a dollar an hour more. Probably had something to do with supporting a political agenda to redistribute the wealth to unionized labor like the "workers of the world unite" slogan from SIEU and the failed Soviet system.
After a few years of this my moral conscious finally kicked in to rescue my soul so I got out of the govt contract system. Now I make less but I live better.
Sounds like the setup for Daemon.
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
That's exactly the point of the original poster in this thread:
When employees incentives are not aligned with the company's goals, the goals suffer
This holds whether the employee in question is the CEO, a system administrator, or a sales guy. The CEO's incentives are aligned with the current share price. That means that he will push for short-term profits at the expense of a longer-term future for the company. The sales guy's incentives are aligned with making a sale now, rather than building customer relations.
There are a couple of things you can do to address this. You can defer the majority of the CEO's renumeration and have it linked to the share price 5-10 years later. To get the most money, the CEO needs to leave the company in such a state that its value will continue to increase (or, at least, not decrease) over his successor's tenure.
You can give sales staff bonuses for indirect sales, so they get a bonus if one of your customers buys something from you in the future. You can make these cumulative, so sales to companies that the sales rep has worked with for a long time are worth more. This means that it's in his or her best interest to build long-term relationships with clients. If telling them not to buy anything today means that they'll buy more tomorrow, then the sales rep gets more money. Importantly, make sure this happens even if another sales rep takes over that client's account.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If that's not how the CEO sees it then he's the wrong person to be running the company. I'm currently employed by a smallish MSP and I know who would win out in our company. If the sales guy is trying to sell them something they don't need he's going to at least get told off. I would personally chose option b but as always, being a little careful how you say can make a world of difference.
Seriously, right now we are spending record peacetime levels on defense...
Peacetime??? We have admitted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This does not count the military efforts in Pakistan and Yeman. This is far from any definition of Peacetime.
Unfortunately it seems that a vast amount of our military spending is for equipment not well suited for the types of demands that we have placed upon or military.
I also work for an IT contractor, although fairly small so I can go smack the sales guys on the head a few doors over as needed. I go for option B/E all the time. In my view, IT is kind of like a a bottomless pit you throw money into. You can throw more and more, but there is ALWAYS something else you can do. There's always an extra backup system you can add, an extra redundancy, an user experience you can improve, etc. But businesses have finite IT budgets, and all the slick sales guys in the world won't change that. So seeing as how there's a practically infinite opportunities to spend IT money in an organization that will have tangible benefits, I don't see the point in letting the sales guys get away with wasting their money. If I feel its a waste, I tell them that, and point out 2 or 3 things to them and the sales guys that should be higher priority. In my experience, the sales guys in IT are some of the most easily influenced by other salesmen I've ever met. A vendor comes through, gives a demonstration of their network appliance or software package of the week, tells them how all their customers will be knocking down the door to give them their money to buy it, and uses every tired old pitch technique in the book. The same techniques the sales guys use on their customers every day. And they buy it hook, line, and sinker. They go out and tell all their customers they have to have X, even when they themselves don't really understand what it does, but the vendors salesman told them so. Someone needs to inject some reality into the situation, or you wind up with a customer that has spent their entire budget on the latest buzzwords and their basic IT infrastructure is a disaster. Whether we spent their IT money on buzzwords, or we spent their IT money on things they needed, we still got their money. But one way leads to the customer saying at the end of the year "We spent $x on IT with you guys, and we still have tons of problems! Our PC's crash, our network is slow, our backups don't work, wtf?" and the other way leads to building a long term relationship with the customer that will keep them as our customer.
Uncontrolled greed is the enemy of IT contracting in my mind. We are all in business to make money, but wanting to make money and being blinded by greed are very different. If every time you went to the doctor, he tried to sell you some new wonder drug you can only get from him, the first you might be inclined to believe him, after all he is the doctor, he knows more about medicine then you do. So you would buy it, and the doctor would make extra money. But when the medicine didn't make you feel better, and everytime you went back he wanted to sell you a new, different wonder drug, that THIS time would solve all your problems, pretty quickly you would find a new doctor. Next thing you know, the practice that doctor has built up over a decade is gone. The same thing for IT. Most of our customers don't know what they have, they don't understand it, they don't know what they need. They rely on us to tell them. But if we tell them lies, we will make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually they will get tired of shoveling money at us and seeing no results.
Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?
I AM.
Now, give me mod points or Something Terrible will happen. Muahahaha.
I guess the only reason why the usual args about Conservative-vs-Liberal-vs-Libertarian always pop up is because of people's basic believes: the first and last tend to distrust government, while liberals/progressives/(choose your label) tend to believe it the answer to most large problems.
Without even getting into that -- (I beg you) -- and trying to simply state and face facts: the government is incompetent. Sure, large corporations have committed their own boners (witness the number of stories that regularly appear about compromised credit card info, just to name one). But what makes anyone think that the government is any better? They lose laptops with top-secret info, THEY get hacked (and half the time, you don't hear about it solely because THEY'RE TOO STUPID TO EVEN REALIZE IT!), and you name it.
Go into any government office and you'll see people playing solitaire, chatting on their cellphones, and generally, doing as little work as possible. Political correctness runs rampant, to the extent that even if someone comes into the building with a laptop and a set of DVDs labeled "W-B-Hackers-LOLZ.com," they'll be scolded if the "assume" anything about that person.
The real answer, though it will NEVER happen and is totally impractical, is to never trust ANY large organization, be it public or private. Just my opinion.
All's I'm saying is, if you think that moving that data from private contractors back into government control will somehow make it safer, you're wrong.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
The overriding principle of outsourcing is that you never outsource your core competency.
While we might engage in endless 'dialog' about the level of competency various governments display, ceding their information functions to private interests is first order corruption.
Any government official, elected or otherwise, who advocates this practice is clueless or on the take.
Recently here in Wisconsin the contracted company that manages some of the Medicaid and other social programs printed out the Social Security numbers of all recipients of a large mailing on the OUTSIDE of the envelopes. OOPS!
Are these contractors perfect? Absolutely not. I have seen failures that could only be resolved by kicking the contractor out. This is obviously painful to the contractor, but very disruptive to the state. States could save themselves this disruption by changing some of their procurement rules (e.g., the bidder with the lowest bid price exceeds a minimum technical score) that reward lower quality proposals. They could also increase the Medicaid program's performance by optimizing their end-to-end business processes prior to issuing an RFP. Many states' business processes are fundamentally broken. If you compare the head count used in a state-staffed operation vs. the head count used in a contractor-staffed operation, you often see a two- or three-to-one difference. Medicaid RFPs are notoriously ambiguous and routinely include phrases such as "including but limited to" in requirements statements. Fully modeled and documented processes generate fully developed use cases.
The DoI and USA Constitution (IMHO) set forth ideals that enfranchise and empower The People of the USA.
Political, Religious, Economic parties and dogma seek to enfranchise and empower their totalitarian institutions and those individuals that abide and thrive with dogma.
The People that reason effective, know that dogma affected people are not USA Citizens and Patriots, which defend and protect the The DoI from tyranny, The USA Constitution, guaranteed civil rights of The People, and will never seek the oppression of The People by any institutions (Government, Military, Religion, Business/Industry...).
A Nation of The People, Governed by The People, Enfranchising and Empowering The People is clear when reading The DoI and USA Constitution. The Founding Families' and The People's intent when interpreted by dogma regurgitation is an insult to the USA founding Ideals as expressed in The DoI and USA Constitution, and by USA People and Patriots.
THE USA CONSTITUTIONAL REALITY:
A minimal federal governance of The People is critical to USA People, Patriots, Democracy, and Capitalism.
A maximum federal governance of institutions is critical to USA People, Patriots, Democracy, and Capitalism.
If We The People cannot separate Dogma-agenda from State-governance, then the fall is immanent for US.
The present government derives all of its authority and purpose from Government, Military, Religion, Business/Industry... institutions. The USA in no longer a Democracy or Capitalist Economy. The USA is a Plutocracy where the princes of wealth-power are enfranchised to legally exploit citizens.
RETURNING BACK TO TOPIC: Who's Controlling Our Vital Systems? Answer: NOT US FOR DAMN SURE!
I am old, I will die in another one or two decades, too all you younger dogma fools/suckers in the USA - FUCKUS and INGODWETRUST are equivalent statements, you just always hear what you want to always hear. I'll be dead and gone a decade or more before Rome falls into the dark age.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The short term focus leads to a infrastructure that older and older and held together by quick fixes. With no one in IT encouraged to take a long term big picture view, the deferred costs continue to add up. Eventually I left since I was bored and didn't want to become a reboot monkey. There's a spectacular failure coming up.
The government seldom picks the lowest bidder or the best technology proposal (Can't do a google search, spell-check) . In the case of telecommunications/IT (FBI, CIA, DoD... how many ISE failures and redo-solutions) the CIO/G6 is typically a business management position, not a technology (science, engineering...) management position. CIO/G6 certification in .gov or .mil domain does not require experience or an understanding of binary, protocols, benchmarks, classmarks....
CIO/G6 .gov, .mil... SES (most, not all) can use blog and wiki, or WWW and Internet, or bits and bytes, or ... as synonyms in program and project meetings, and never are told/corrected by anyone in government or industry.... So, YES!, nepotism and fuck-up...move-up trends continue in .gov/.mil technology.
There are many good CIO/G6 folks in government, but they cannot be promoted, when they are needed to do the hold-IT-together job. Any social-skills SME idiot can manage FUBAR and SNAFU projects, blame-storm who failed, and receive rewards, recognition, and promotions for FUCKUPS, as long as the professionals hold-IT-together.
I have been told many times how technical and complex is a manager's job, my reply, I have a technology troubleshooting job (thinking, I get paid less, fix problems, and ...).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
No, the OP is right. We are spending Record Peacetime Levels. All funding for the wars that we are currently in, come from supplemental and emergency budgets. Basically, we pay for our normal military costs, and borrow to pay for the wars. It was determined that it would be politically bad to ask for the money upfront, in a normal budget, because then the "other" party could talk about how much was getting spent. (remember when I guy got asked to resign, for saying the Iraq war could cost upwards of 150Billion!!)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I've been fired for doing that. Not a team player and all that.
In Belgium architects fees work like that. If you're surprised that your house went over budget by just a tad, check out the carbon fibre closet liners and the monocrystalline copper water pipes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I really don't know how to respond to a post like yours -- perhaps you unaware of the article and history of modern life -- perhaps you're simply unaware.
to put it as unsophisticated as possible -- the American intelligence community is majority privatized -- that means no FOIA, no transparency, no control, and 1,000 times the cost. PERIOD!
Its the entire American IT structure. Many businesses also don't understand the ramifications and just bid out and take the lowest price attached to the best looking sales rep.
Once they do get burnt, they bring it back in house.
I don't know if its a misunderstanding of what role IT plays in their organization, or if its just the overall mentality of slashing all immediate costs ( I have seen both... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You need to be honest. IT contractors need the repeat business from their big clients, and that means they need trust. We want that client to come back for a bigger project, for more on-hand staff, for more hardware, for more support contracts.
OTOH, if you see a valid sales opportunity (like something the client needs or can use without him even realizing it), you need to bring in your organization's salespeople. This means knowing your organization's product/services portfolio; otherwise you can't ever recognize those opportunities (and won't ever get the bonuses attached to generating new business)
As for your last comment; that telling the client they don't really need something means you're saying the sales guy is incompetent: that isn't correct. You're the engineer, he is the sales guy. Most clients already understand this, which is _why_ they are also asking you this question, instead of just listening to the sales guy.
Lastly, I hope you're never trying to disassociate yourself from your organization like "Well, salesperson Y did say you needed that, but _personally_ I think you should ...". Don't do that. You need to speak for your organization, in your function of IT professional. Otherwise, you _would_ be stabbing your organization in the back.
Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?
Words to live by...
Cheap storage VM.