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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.
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.
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
Simple automation programming is so obvious I just can't imagine how incompetent the decision makers in these organizations must be.
Possibly because the applications are not "simple" and perhaps because you have never dealt with a bureaucracy of any reasonable size. Its not that individuals are dumb, its the cumulative effect of lots of people not having the 100% best picture
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I bet the problem is budget.
"Well, we'd like to stop doing these stupid things, but we don't have money to deploy a new system."
And no one is willing to pony up the investment in modernization to save money in the long run. There are stupidities like this in every organization!
It is all about the local minimum energy state.
--PM
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").
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The difference being, my friend, is that if the private sector continues those practices, the people responsible for the practices get let go or they go out of business, and then the only people who pay for it are the shareholders, not the tax payers. That is, unless the Federal Government bails them out so they can continue with wasteful practices.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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
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.
can't wait for a government health care system run like that.
Like what? As others have pointed out above, with actual emprical data rather than ideological cant, single-payer/public/non-profit systems have lower overheads than the US private system. Even Medicare in the US has lower overheads than private American insurers.
Overhead is a primary measure of efficiency. Lower overhead means more efficient.
There are no actual facts supporting any claim of superiority for the US private health care system: people in countries with public systems live longer and spend less than Americans do.
This does not mean Obamacare is a good idea: it isn't, because too many ignorant ideologues have prevented Obama from setting up a genuine public system of the kind found the world over, from Canada to Sweden to Australia, where in all cases average outcomes are better, lives are longer, and costs are lower than in the American system.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Definitely not "simple." As grossly inefficient as it is, the system is not permitted to go down for a week or two for upgrades. Laws REQUIRE certain procedures to be followed (no "let's just skip that check because it's not economical"). Other laws may REQUIRE that certain procedure steps be done in a certain way (physical signatures, work to be done in a particular location chosen by a once-powerful Senator, etc). Yet other laws REQUIRE use of certain software (originally intended to force efficiency on some part of the process).
So the technological solution needs to be paired with a legislative overhaul.
Now let's say someone crafts a perfect law which would make the process better for everyone. Every congressman wants to vote for it. So then somebody will attach an amendment about a bridge, and somebody else will insert a gun control measure. Because everybody likes this law, right? And the whole process grinds to a halt.
If there is a real competitor. If they are more efficient. If everything else is equal.
That's a lot of ifs, 3 is a particularly uncommon and is in fact undesirable for investors. 1 is horrible for customers if the entry barriers are high.
And even if all of the above holds true, sort term efficiency is easier to gain by underpaying and overworking employees, not reorganizing to avoid bottlenecks. Reorganization by virtue of new players without encrusted processes bankrupting older players can be hardly called efficient either...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I'm sure you're aware that WalMart makes extensive use of Communist China's slave labour pool. And a lot of that "efficiency" they force on their other suppliers results in off-loading infrastructure costs onto the taxpayer. And let's not forget their practice of keeping employees perpetually under the magic "full-time" level, where they'd get benefits. The cost of those benefits winds up being paid by taxpayers. That's particularly true in the US, where WalMart employees are famous for their reliance on emergency rooms and state health care programs.
I wonder if you were aware when you chose Wally World as your poster boy that you picked a company that more than almost any other has enriched itself by a particularly pernicious variety of corporate welfare, and an unbreakable liplock on the public teat.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.