Slashdot Mirror
Vivek Kundra On US Government Inefficiency
parkland writes "Federal CIO Vivek Kundra described some dismaying government inefficiencies in a speech on Thursday at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle. It takes 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said, 'because the Veteran's Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another.' Another example bound to make you grind your teeth is why it takes the Patent and Trademark Office 3 years to process a patent. 'One reason,' says Kundra, 'is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.'"
Is because there's no consequence for them doing a bad job, so they can take their own sweet time. You have to screw up pretty badly to get fired by the Federal government.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I work in academia, which is in many ways culturally similar to working in government. I wonder how many of these inefficiencies persist in order to placate an aged workforce that refuses to embrace technology and learn to do anything in a new way.
I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.
--saint
I am Jack's unsurprised countenance.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
There really is no excuse for this disgustingly large waste of money. Simple automation programming is so obvious I just can't imagine how incompetent the decision makers in these organizations must be.
"This is not how to run a modern government in the 20th century," he said.
Actually thats probably par for the course for the 20th century!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'd rather the patent office simply put the applications in the trash and never approve of anything.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Because the actual job of the government is not provide effective services, but to employ the most people to do the least effective job in a constant state of perpetual near-failure as to get larger budgets.
Seriously! I don't see this position in the Constitution? I don't remember Congress creating the post? I don't even remember Congress vetting this woman? Where the hell does she think she gets all her power from?
We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency"
'One reason,' says Kundra, 'is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.'" I wonder if they're using EBCDIC
In government, the more money you waste, the more money you get. The incentive is to be inefficient.
This tends to be a real cultural problem, with several cultural contributing factors. These include:
1. Resistance to change.
2. Resistance to cutting positions. Many govmnt people would rather do a boring inefficient job than have no job. They are there for the benefits and pay check, not the reward of a job well done. The unions support this because more employees equal more power. The departments support it for the same reason.
3. All efficiency programs tend to be big bang, big buck efforts with a majority doomed to failure. The idea is that everything needs to be fixed at once, or not at all. Besides, it is a lot easier getting $20million for a big project that $10,000 for a quick easy fix that would make a significant difference but not take care of all of the world's ills.
4. Many of the people in govnmt have no real concept of where to begin and when they want to do something, the system means that they eaither hire someone with the same govmnt experience and mindset, or they turn to one of the big consulting firms which design their solutions to milk the most money out of the govnment rather than actually solve the problems. The proposals get written to encourage this as well.
The surprise is not that the inefficiencies exist, it is that many of them have actually been resolved.
and you want these touch holes in charge of your health care?
Cue "OMG why don't they just use open source? It'd be ever so much easier and it's FREE!!!"
I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.
Pfft. That's everywhere -- government, academia, and the private sector. The bit about not updating your technology to placate a stagnant workforce is more prominent in the former two than the latter where people are replaceable commodities (aka "human resources"), but running out the clock happens anywhere that people don't take a lot of pride in their work and just want to collect a paycheck and go home.
But even the private sector has legacy hardware to placate rather than update and replace. Why do you think COBOL and PL/I programmers did so well in the late 90s? Sometimes the pain of updating a process just can't be justified in the short term, and the private sector is even more focused on the quarterly/yearly budget than government & academia.
I'll bet the USPTO has been wanting to replace that process for years if not decades. It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever. It's probably some combination of "costs to much," "too afraid to let things get backlogged in the transition," and "if it isn't broke (enough), don't fix it."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I always laugh at the comments for articles like this. When are people going to realise that there is just as much waste in the private sector? Corporate jets, business lunches, exorbitant salaries, etc are all just another form of waste. Not to mention the fact that plenty of business are only concerned with the short term financial gain (to please shareholders) and not the long term health of the business/product.
Government jobs, Federal, State and Local are almost treated like a jobs program. Everyone has heard the noise when tax receipts (I refuse to call it revenue) fall short and people have to be let go. The stimulus plan was the Federal government borrowing money to save the jobs of State and Local employees. In my town alone Police, Fire, Teachers and Construction have been hired with two years of stimulus funds. When the money runs out in a year, do we get a new Federal stimulus? The Feds don't have to be efficient, because they have no competition, and if you put 25% of government workers out, unemployment goes up another 5%. There is no reason to do things better if it reduces the number of workers.
As long as the USPTO is out there rubber stamping claims, then it's best that their rubber stamp is as inefficient as possible.
The number of patents issued is already far too large and needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude from today's levels. In the absence of truly reforming the patent-industrial-complex to protect only truly exceptional innovations, government waste is better than nothing.
This is exactly right. Each department would most certainly like to improve efficiencies by streamlining the workflow with IT. The problem is that implementing that IT costs money above and beyond what they've got right now. How to pay for it?
Incidentally, this would have been a great place for stimulus money. Inject money into the system right now (stimulus) in a way that lowers long term costs. Then, once it gets up and running (after months to years of defining, planning, implementing, and testing), you trim down those departments either through reassigning or through attrition.
Yeah yeah, I know around here the perception is that civil servants exist in this parallel twilight zone where they lean on shovels all day at best or interfere with individuals at worst, but that perception simply isn't reality. Some departments are better than others, often because of leadership and resource availability, just like in the private sector and the non-profit sector. Hopefully the CIO can identify opportunities and find the funding to implement savings.
On a side note, this does suggest a way to find those savings: check printing budgets over time. It seems that printing and then re-entering information may be common, and printing budgets may be helpful in identifying where these processes exist.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Are they using some kind of giant land-snails as intra-office couriers?
Seriously, the delay must be due to the time the folders spend sitting untouched in a filing cabinet or on someone's desk, not in transit. They could just as easily store digital information, unprocessed, on a server or desktop computer for the same amount of time.
Most likely they will blame all problems on lack of computerization, then spend $100 million on a new computer system (which will be obsolete by the time it is complete) and 10 years later the real problems still won't be fixed.
It's a good thing that he's identified the problem....but..he has no budgetary authority to influence the VA's IT spending decisions. If the VA does decide to upgrade their systems, it's the beltway bandits that will influence the choice of software..not Kundra.
You ever been to Hobby Lobby? The private sector can do it worse. And at least we can lobby or run for office to make the government use bar-code scanners.
I work in academia, which is in many ways culturally similar to working in government. I wonder how many of these inefficiencies persist in order to placate an aged workforce that refuses to embrace technology and learn to do anything in a new way.
I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.
--saint
It's not just the age of the workers... there are plenty of younger workers in the Federal Government. It's also a matter of jobs. Government unions are arguably the most powerful in the country, and thus are resistant to anything that would bring business-like efficiencies. Keep in mind that in the private sector, technological improvements allow you to do more with less. Why would Federal unions want that? Slowpoke paper operations keep more people on the payroll. If you brought modern information management and paperless office techniques to the government, you'd literally take away the only reason for the existence of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for!"
There are all kinds of ideological explanations for why this *must* be so, but I don't think they hold water.
My first management job was at a largish non-profit where I inherited a three year IT request backlog. So I analyzed the backlog and discovered that most of it consisted of requests for software to speed moving decisions from what amounted to the user's in tray to the out tray, and pretty soon I realized all those in-out transformations formed a network. I charted out the network, and it was *obvious* that certain key information latencies could be reduced from 35 days to about half a day by rerouting the information through this network. In fact, most of the work in the network could be eliminated entirely, while providing better, But rather than spring this on people, I just laid out the charts and they figured everything out for themselves. That way I didn't have to persuade anyone.
Now the interesting question was how this kind of situation could happen. It's not because the people were stupid. They weren't. It wasn't because they were lazy or not dedicated. Quite the contrary. Lack of profit motive certainly played a part in the evolution of the problem, but it did not create the least barrier to addressing the problem.
What we had was two levels of people in the organization. People down in the ranks who cared about the mission of the organization and understood their local piece of the process. And people at the top who sometimes cared about the mission of the organization, but were mainly focused on shmoozing. But nobody had any idea what the *whole* process looked like. So the people in the ranks were largely left to guide themselves in solving problems. They were self-starters, they had initiative, what they lacked was a global understanding of how everything fit together. So they talked to their neighbors in the existing process about where they were under pressure, then they demanded the higher ups provide them with tools to reduce the pressure at individual points. The higher ups had no idea how to fix these things, so they just stuck the requests onto the back of a three year queue, and when things began to catch fire they'd demand the queue get resorted.
But the queue shouldn't have existed at all. When folks were done applying common sense to the big picture I provided, most of the dreaded request queue evaporated. My backlog went forty months down to under thirty days, and I didn't have a lick of code written.
What was missing was *leadership*. In my book leadership equals caring about the results plus understanding how the process works.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is not a problem of gov't. This happens in all forms of commerce public or private sector. The common factor is the HUMAN in the loop. Let me clarify that it is not all humans but there are those among us that side step all responsibility and accountability. They look for positions of protection and abuse them. Just look at the abuse of tenure in the school systems. Sorry to say it but the problem can not be solved unless we change our culture. I see this everyday but since I don't have any social connections to management I am pretty much powerless to act. If I do act it would be me on the way out the door. Sad but very true. Just my 2
In a normal company, if you're inefficient, you make less money.
You could not be more wrong. In most large companies, what passes for efficiency is neither faster nor cheaper. Success is based mostly on being the loudest with the deepest pockets.
In small companies, it is merely the persuasive abilities of the customer facing people and the rare pragmatic customer.
Seriously, it it time for this doublethink to die.
The government never makes money
Yes, they do. Fees? Penalties? Taxes? It's time for the "Government is the root of all inefficiency" to die.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm glad SOMEONE has finally point out what some of these inefficiencies are. I (like many others here) consider myself a fiscal conservative. But it bugs the heck out of me that Republicans are always complaining about government inefficiency, but they never provide any evidence to back it up, or propose anything to improve the inefficiencies (except cutting taxes...whatever THAT's supposed to do). Republicans don't WANT to solve inefficiencies in government for fear of losing a useful campaign issue. Everything is "pork"....unless it's money being spent in their district, then it's vital for helping their economy. And that makes them all the more hypocritical in my eyes. Unfortunately, the Democrats aren't doing anything about it either, but at least they're not hypocrites.
I would LOVE it if Obama started an Efficiency-in-Government initiative, but he hasn't lived up to the hype. And of course the Republicans/Fox News would somehow manage to spin it as being socialist/communist anyway.
1. I hardly doubt this guy just fired off this screed on his own.
2. So, Vivek, how much would a new Patent Administration cost? How long would it take? You wouldn't have your job long enough to see the project complete, successfully or otherwise.
3. How about that VA system huh? Let's stake your entire career on changing it. Ohhh now that YOUR skin is in the game, suddenly the status-quo looks pretty good.
For every system that can be selectively discredited, there are 10 or more that are cost effective and relatively efficient with competent government employees in them.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The Patent Office does not do that and hasn't for years, except of course for papers that are mailed or faxed in. The Patent Office's Electronic Filing System is an end-to-end electronic system for the most part.
Now, the EFS system does convert searchable PDFs to bitmap PDFs, which causes them to lose their searchability and greatly increases the file size, which is still incredibly backwards, but not quite as bad as printing things out and scanning them back in.
How many mega-disasters have we read about here on slashdot that go like this: some government wanted to upgrade their outdated system, so they hired some ultra-expensive contracting company. The project went way over-budget and took way longer than estimated. By the time it was done, it was obsolete. Besides being obsolete, nothing worked correctly. The government spent insane mega-bucks to try and fix the borked project, but everything was too horridly broken to fix. So they decided to spend more mega-bucks to go back to the old system.
I was commissioned to contribute to a large information system development proposal to a government that shall remain nameless.
The first draft of the proposal I submitted had selling points like:
"If you let us build this information bridging system (essentially a data warehouse and workflow system), you will be able to process these applications many times faster, and with better information available to the application reviewers in different departments,
so that better decisions can be made."
This, was a non-starter.
In a meeting with the government representatives, I actually heard them say: "We don't want to be able to process applications faster. That would reduce our staff requirements and our departmental budget."
So we came back with a proposal that said:
"We'll build this system so you can package up the government data you have from various departments, and sell it
to corporations and the public. (Re-sell it back to the owners, more accurately, since the data was public property already paid for by taxpayers). This way, your departments can make a revenue stream, maybe even a profit."
Wow, think of the brownie points we'd get for that from our political overlords! They thought.
And we got the multi-million dollar contract.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
...Terry Gilliam directed the USPTO.
Hey, how's it going?
I love government inefficiency. It slows down the works. It's the next best thing to gridlock. When it comes to infringing my rights, taking my money, regulating my conduct, and snooping into my affairs, I want the government to be as inefficient as possible.
Do you guys really want the USPTO cranking out fifty thousand patents a day?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
None these inefficiencies have anything to do with the size of the government, but rather has everything to do with inadequate funding of government. I'm serious. Let's say the USPTO came to congress and said, "We need $200 million to modernize our system, after two years of installation and training, we'll have a system that can cut the approval process for patents down to six months, and can also decrease the number of invalid patents." Antigovernment groups would be up in arms. "Oh no! An expansion of government! Too inefficient! Government it is axiomatically bad at everything! The horror! The horror!" But no, they don't actually want to fix the problems (because that would run counter to their belief that everything government ever does is bad, regardless of the facts).
All this "starve the beast" mentality is, as Reagan's Chief of Staff, Bruce Bartlett said, "simply unrealistic to think that tax cuts will continue to be a viable political strategy."
You lose, by the the old playground rule: your-own-guy-says-so.
After all, we all know what type of job they guy that sits around complaining about how he doesn't want to do the job does right? He does a crappy job. We all know this. We know this from childhood. We've all done it ourselves. So what type of government do you think you're going to get from people that don't like government? A crappy one of course. Only now that same malingerer turns around says, "Gee, government sure does suck now doesn't it?" No, you're intentionally doing a shitty job.
Is he going to solve this with COBOL or skip logic, or maybe a holodeck?
Just curious.
+1 internets for anyone who knows what I'm talking about...
I am a government worker. Foreign Service. You my friend are spot on. But I'd extend your jobs program definition to the military as well.
I am a liberal. I was very excited by Obama's election. I'll vote for him again. But, I have to say that since I started working for the Governemt I've become disillusioned. I now believe we need 50%+ cuts in ALL federal agencies. 30% isn't enough. It wouldn't go noticed. We need MASSIVE reductions. I come from the software industry (granted it was Microsoft but still) innovation is rewarded in technology. In government it is to be avoided. We really need massive cuts, so that the good people (and there are many) are forced to think on their feet and come up with better solutions.
I worked in an IT office of a state government for a short period.
The system in place was that the department was staffed and run by incompetent unionized government employees, unqualified and incapable of doing their jobs. Union dues were mandatory for all state employees, there was no freedom to opt out. The powerful state employee union guaranteed that state union employees could never be fired. Mostly they screwed stuff up and collected paychecks. The actual work was done by private contractors. Some of which were honest and hard working. Others were deceitful and lazy and they had not problem pulling the wool over their incompetent paymasters in state government.
The kind if inefficiencies which which Kundra sites are an eternal and intrinsic aspect of government; Public employee unions insure that incompetent employees remain employed in government. Incompetent employees, by definition, operate wastefully and inefficiently. The power to tax insures that no matter how wasteful, government agencies continue. That is unlike private enterprises which are required to have a net social benefit, producing goods or services of equal or grater value than what they consume.
The examples which Kundra sites are symptomatic manifestations of the government system of waste. His public expression of opposition to government waste will make him popular with a public which shares those sentiments, but as a member of an administration which seeks to grow that system by historic proportions his real role is to enable that expansion by allaying concerns using the false promise that something is being done.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A government good at tax collection, or enforcement of other blatantly stupid laws like the drug laws would be pretty onerous.
All hail paper manila folders!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In a previous life I made my living working for a mortgage lender that did a high volume of VA and FHA loans. Though the end result of the loan origination process in the FHA/VA world is the same as that when dealing with a commercial bank (property owner gets check, loan applicant gets house and mortgage), the "how you get there" was completely different.
Perhaps the single biggest difference, at least in terms of impact on my job, was the trouble resolution process.
All the banks operated slick websites with functioning trouble-ticket systems, staffed call centers with actual human beings you could talk to about your issues, and generally made an acceptable effort to fix problems.
When you had a technical problem with FHA or VA, what could you do? You could email a generic mailbox with your question and hope for the best. That's it!
Once I managed to track down a real, somewhat technically-aware human being at the VA so I could inquire about a persistent, apparently unaddressed trouble we were having accessing a particular feature of the va.gov site. Her answer? "Yeah, that goes down all the time, just give it a few days and they'll get it fixed." This was accepted as normal there, and probably still is.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
can't wait for a government health care system run like that.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I am a government worker.
I never liked the term government worker it implies they actually do something.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
This seems to be a classic mistake. It is assumed that there is a method which will control and regulate innovation in the physical world. It is a rookie programming mistake and is an ongoing fork bomb that is only limited by the inefficiency of the process itself . If it were a multitasking environment then the patent office would continually become more latent in response until it was absurdly unresponsive. It is fine to suggest that the addition of more CPU time might solve it , but if it is a fork bomb, the allocation of more resources will only exacerbate the problem. It is not possible to document or control a process that is exponential in form with a process that operates in linear time.
It is the case of the snake that eats itself. Paradoxical activity. A government can choose to be involved in anything and then later realize that it is an impossibility. I <em>won't</em> site a protracted land war in Asia as one.
At some point the government will realize that what they committed to do is impossible and then they will realize that impossible tasks means permanent appointments and this will become the most prized position.
So, why not replace them? Answer: The federal procurement system. Whether replacement systems are put out for bid under the primary procurement system or through one of the departments that run their own process, the end result is that the losers often tie decisions that don't go their way up in court for years.
Back at a previous employer whos specialty was aviation, one of the primary reasons that the FAA was saddled with ancient technology for years was the practice of losing bidders (including us more often than not) dragging the results into court. We had far more lawyers attached to project proposals than engineers.
When the same tort reform initiatives that are so dear to the hearts of the business community are applied to federal contracts as they want for consumer protection, the bidding process will be cleaned up. The government will get stuff that actually works, or not have to pay for it. But I doubt the business community will let such reforms go through.
Have gnu, will travel.
So let's give the goverment more money so they can be even more efficient at taking our money.
Liberty in your lifetime
Congress has passed so many laws and requirements that any federal agency that wants to modernize has to spend years filling out the impact paperwork.
Add to that an annual, zero-based budget (no long-term funding). Each department has to spend months preparing their budget inputs - all of which gets ignored by Congress who creates their own.
It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever.
True, it has been around forever. It's been written by the same no-talent assclowns who have been waiting out their clocks and covering their asses since the dawn of time. My experience with all these "migration easing" tools is that they are a bigger pain than just writing your own damned code. That's why almost all my migrations are done with a few trivial bits of C++ or PHP.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's easy to find cases of government waste and inefficiency. In spite of their best efforts, democratic governments have to release a certain amount of information about how they conduct business, no matter how embarrassing it may be. And then there's whistle-blowers and ex-employees who are happy to provide an endless fund of stories (many accurate, some not) about incompetence, stupidity and outright law-breaking by bureaucrats.
Private businesses are much better at keeping their failures under wraps. Even their minimal disclosure requirements can be thwarted by a friendly board of directors and a few fairly simple machinations. I can relate one simple case (without getting too specific) that surely matches anything in government: One of the busiest people in this company is currently being forced to take jobs to another floor because equipment a few feet away can't be replaced until a management committee decides on the matter (it's routine stuff, by the way...nothing exotic). That won't happen until one committee member gets back from holidays next month. The resulting bottleneck is costing this mid-sized company (conservatively) more than $1,000 per day simply in lost production. Then we have to figure in overtime for the one particular employee with specific expertise who is being run off her feet, and now has to come in on weekends until the situation is rectified.
The floor manager has decided that it's not worth rocking the boat to get a relatively inexpensive machine replaced on his own authority. Cost to the company: $50,000 at the very least, and a star employee who is already thoroughly pissed off (and the end of the situation a long way off).
So to all people out there who are quick to claim running a government like a corporation will save money and be more efficient: Every time you put more than a handful of people together in an organization, waste happens. Any efficiencies that are realized by cutting staff to the bone and forcing them to work under draconian conditions has an ugly pay-off down the road, too. In any case, if financial gains are made, they go into the corporation's bottomless pockets, not into saving taxpayer dollars. I haven't even included another difference: government does stuff that is inherently unprofitable, like building roads into towns that would never be able to afford such amenities and such.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
One source of the problem is that it takes time to do a replacement. And during that replacement either you run a doubled system for awhile, or you put up with LOTS of interruptions of service that last for unpredictable amounts of time.
Yes, when you're through with the process, your system is a lot better and less expensive. But the intermediate stage is more expensive, and can last for an unpredictable amount of time. (Yeah, predictions are always insisted upon. But that's a CYA move. Everyone either knows, or should know, that they are basically unpredictable.)
The obvious best answer is to run a doubled system while the new one is being put into place. Now justify this to the budget committee.
P.S.: The essential unpredictableness of the time to fix a system being developed is one reason most software projects fail. The normal answer is you take your best guess as to how long a part of the project will take, and double it. This often isn't enough, and doubling everywhere will make the project too expensive to do, so...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A part of the reason they're still using paperwork is that some of these vets are older gentlemen who probably still submit everything hard copy (and hand-written in many cases). Sure, a lot them are younger vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. But I would venture to guess that the majority of paperwork the VA deals will still comes from WWII/Korea/Vietnam vets, who would would raise hell if you tried to tell them they had to submit all their forms electronically. Of course, you could hire data entry people to enter all that data from the hard copies, but that's just adding yet another layer to the bureaucracy, isn't it?
And, before everyone jumps on me, I'm not saying that all old people are computer illiterate. But we all know that a much higher percentage of them are not nearly as comfortable with computers as the younger folks, and would balk at being told they couldn't submit their paperwork on actual paper.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And here I thought at least a few seconds of those three years went into actually reviewing the validity of the patent claims.
This explains a few things.
The real problem is that the manila folder has to pass through at least 20 hands in order to be processed. That way none of them are responsible since any catchable fraud they missed would have been caught by one of the others. Computerizing the manila folder won't solve the 20-hands-irresponsibility problem.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I agree with Kundra, although he's stating the obvious (so who is surprised?). Even so, you'd think the Federal CIO would know what century HE's in. After all, we made such a huge deal of Y2K. But he says, "This is not how to run a modern government in the 20th century," I guess he's going for one century at a time. JR
Literally burning? What are you suggesting, that we take literal matches and literal firewood and...? Wait! Are you suggesting that our government is literally overrun by witches?
(Though it might explain "Newt" Gingrich...)
It's so easy to think that an entire bureaucracy can be replaced by a well-written database application. Theoretically, of course, this is true. Huge amounts of money can be saved by replacing bureaucratic workforces with IT. The nature of bureaucracy is based in logic, so a direct mapping between a government agency's rules and regulations and a computer program SHOULD be easy and direct.
Unfortunately, authenticity of computerized records becomes a real problem. Many forms and other paperwork carry legal weight. The bureaucracies require signatures and even notarization sometimes to prove the authenticity of the bureaucratic stimulus. This proves the effort used to prepare the government's response is legitimate, and to protect against fraud. Therefore, as part of the transition, all such paperwork carrying legal weight will have to be scanned, added to the database as both data records and scan images, and proof read for accuracy. This presents a huge amount of work, especially at the federal level where some government agencies are responsible for storing hundreds of forms for each of the hundreds of millions of citizens in this country. The sheer volume of this work makes the transition to IT impossible.
The biggest problem here is that authentication of electronic records still isn't solved. A look at previous slashdot stories about electronic voting machines will get you up to speed with this issue. People won't trust electronic records if its possible for bad people in the government to monkey around with their filings and benefits.
Another serious problem involves conflicting bureaucratic rules and regulations, most of which were written by politicians reacting to headline-grabbing situations. If these rules were programmed into the database application, the bureaucratic process would grind to a halt. The computer would flag nearly all the records in the database because of conflicting logic in the rules. Poorly written rules and regulations will create a massive failure state that will make the IT version of a government agency seem like a failure from the beginning. For political reasons, an IT version of a government agency will be placed in jeapardy before the project can get off the ground. Of course, the IT department will NEVER have the authority to solve these problems. All we can do is point out the conflicts, propose meaningful changes, and wait for the politicians who may never make a decision.
Even if the logical kinks were magically ironed out of the system, there will always be logical conflicts that come up. What about the soldier who was injured while on active duty, and the injury to his neck did permanent damage to his nervous system? He is vulnerable to bouts of pain so severe that he will collapse to the ground and become a complete invalid for the rest of the day until he recovers. He was declared permanently disabled by his civilian doctor, but declared able-bodied by the military doctor. Because of this, both the military and the social security department have denied him disability benefits, he's been separated from the military (honorably), and can't get a job because he can't guarantee that he can finish a shift. The question is, how will the IT version of the bureaucracy handle conflicting inputs (in this case from the doctors) when trying to determine this man's current condition and status?
Bureaucracies by their nature are always trying to categorize people and things and apply rules to these groups. Unfortunately, there are many occasions when a person or thing doesn't fit into an available category, and other occasions where some people are given special treatment for one reason or another, and this helps create some of the logical conflicts mentioned above. An IT application designed to follow the rules of the bureaucracy won't have the wisdom, the intelligence, or the authorization to create new categories to pigeon-hole these statistical outliers, or to show some flexibility and willingne
On some level, I do not want the government to be more streamlined and effective. Wait until they can track your Carbon output, recycling percentage, anything else they want to monitor for taxation or enforcement purposes. The (it will protect the children!)National Data Mining Information Recovery and Response Act of 2017 anyone?
I'm taking a class in enterprise modeling and the professor is adamant that most improvements come from improving the process. A clear streamlined manual process can run rings around a well automated byzantine process.
The key is to take a big picture look at the whole process and then ask why things are done that way.
One of the examples from class was a process used to procure prototype parts. The process used to take 80 days and people were happy with it. He and a couple of grad students were able to reduce it to 20 days.
It's mostly getting rid of boneheaded things. One supplier would build a prototype part before building the final part. Why bother building a prototype of a prototype??? If you take a step back, you can start to find things like this and eliminated them.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
Until a couple of hours ago, I had never heard nor read this statement.
Someone used that as an answer to address verification for me. I come here a couple of hours later, and read the same statement.
If that gets modded anything, it needs +1 Creepy.
I tried to go to the RMV (DMV everywhere else) to get a duplicate license today, and there wasn't a single center within 30 miles of Boston that had less that 1 hr wait! The Boston office it self had a 2.5 hr wait!!! Moreover, when I got there I had some issues due to a 6 yr old fine that I didn't know about from NJ. For some f-ed up reason I can pay for the duplicate license with a credit card, but the fine had to be paid for in cash. Not knowing I'd have to pay a fine I didn't have cash on me. Here's were things get really F-ed: At that point I'd been waiting for 1hr 40 min to get service (I took a bus to a branch outside Boston), during this time they had closed the gate to the office. Just outside the office was an atm (100 ft away tops), but they wouldn't let me leave to get the cash and come back!!! Now I get to waist another 3 hrs (1 hr in transit) to do it all again on Monday!! Talk about inefficiencies!
At the time of this post, the quote at the bottom of the page was: "What sin has not been committed in the name of efficiency?"
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
I think Government's primary responsibility is to 'create' jobs and not 'inefficiency'.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga