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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."
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Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
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. :(
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
That seems to be the definition of "radical" these days. I guess that also makes you a right-wing extremist or an anarcho-libertarian. Isn't that what they call anyone who wants a minimal federal government that derives all of its authority and purpose from a literal, strict reading of the Constitution?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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I guess that also makes you a right-wing extremist or an anarcho-libertarian. Isn't that what they call anyone who wants a minimal federal government that derives all of its authority and purpose from a literal, strict reading of the Constitution?
The Libertarians would also sell off our roads to the Chinese despite the Constitution calling for federal regulation of them, so you'll need to find some other name for people wanting a literal reading of the Constitution (like "strict constructionist")
My whole point was that the labels were not being used correctly. You are merely reiterating my point. It sometimes surprises me that people can feel such a need to do this that the redundancy of it does not deter them.
Having said that, it's my personal belief that the truest Libertarians were the Founding Fathers. Today's Libertarian Party as a political organization can either follow in those footsteps or it can fail to do so, but that does not concern me as an individual. Although, I personally do not know of anyone identifying themselves as Libertarian who advocates having the government take actions that are blatantly illegal under the Constitution. That would be like people who refer to themselves as (i.e.) Christian and then do things that clearly contradict the tenets of Christianity. They can say whatever they want, but they are still engaging in hypocrisy.
If there are self-described "Libertarians" who want to sell public roads to China, they certainly do not represent all Libertarians. Most Libertarian thinkers I have ever heard from are quite the opposite; they believe many of today's problems are caused by the government exceeding its authority and engaging in behaviors that are either unconstitutional or questionably constitutional.
Like any other philosophy that would radically and favorably alter the status quo if correctly understood and implemented, Libertarianism should be easy to understand but the waters have been muddied on purpose. There is no such confusion of terms with the statists who want an even more dictatorial government that is even more involved in the daily lives of its citizens. Libertarianism is a very simple idea: your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Until and unless you strike my nose, where and how you swing your fist is none of the government's concern, not even if they think they know what's best for you.
This is not a rejection of all law enforcement or all regulation. It's a clarification of the purpose thereof. The confusion comes from the assumption that everyone who has any degree of Libertarian thought is a radical, extremist Libertarian who desires an anarco-capitalist society. The purpose of that is to cause people to dismiss the philosophy as absurd without actually examining it. Unfortunately average people won't put apparent absurdity to the test and find out if it is actual absurdity before choosing to dismiss new ideas. If you practice looking deeply into things, you will find that influential people and monied interests are keenly aware of this fact. One mechanism they use to protect their status quo is the gross misrepresentation of any ideas that would change it if implemented.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
Like any good programmer, I myself have Libertarian learnings. I mean-- who doesn't like the idea that a simple and elegant system of governance will produce the best outcome? It's a principle that has served me well in my years of building reliable software.
But there are a couple blind spots in the Libertarian philosophy. One is that, even in cases where government intervention is undesirable, merely having their presence ads a great deal of stability. E.g., fundamental science research would be largely stagnant without organizations such as the NSF, NIH, NIST, and NASA (among many others). Becoming an expert (i.e., PhD) in something like physics or computer science takes a great deal of time and personal sacrifice. Making it risky as well would largely kill those fields; and having experts of that kind are a matter of national importance. These organizations keep the flow of money steady so that, for the most part, when you get your degree, you can find employment. Likewise, we really want a stable, enduring organization to ensure that we have roads, bridges, railways, etc. The presence and overall reliability of these things means that commerce can move ahead unimpeded. The cost of maintaining, e.g., the route from California's orchards to Massachusetts' supermarkets is largely externalized from the cost of growing and selling produce.
And that brings me to the other blind spot: global competition. Sadly, we cannot be a nation unto itself anymore. We are a player in a global marketplace-- there's no going back. When you have to compete against nations like China, which artificially manipulates its currency value to stay competitive, which engages in human rights abuses to keep labor costs low, which ignores costly pollution controls (at the expense of the rest of the world) to keep their products cheap-- you cannot compete unless you have a big player that can even the odds a little. Modern statehood is a very complicated thing, and I think that most Libertarians really are living in the past to some degree, evidenced largely by their frequent calls to "Constitutionality". Hey, the world's changed in the last 230 years! It's a good document, but it was also expected to be a living document.
As you suggest, we should indeed clarify the purpose of regulation. E.g., as we've now discovered, the Glass-Steagall act was an essential bit of market regulation-- it kept the markets from being so volatile that people lost their trust in the system. If putting your money into a bank is the same thing as putting your money on a gambling table, well, you're going to put your money under your mattress instead. Given that a safe lending system is a major source of entrepreneurship and upward mobility, having lending dry up is a major problem for an economy that wants to keep growing. We just need to make sure that "re-examining" our legislation is not the same thing as throwing it all out. I'd gladly switch to a simple flat tax if there was some assurance that wealthy people and corporations actually paid up. As it is, those people and their companies use the national infrastructure that is paid for with the hard work of the rest of us.