Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws

imac.usr writes "A story in today's Washington Post calls to light the utter failure of the nation's most sacred final resting place to modernize its pen-and-paper record system. According to the story, the cemetery's administrators have spent $5 million without managing to accomplish the seemingly simple task of creating a database record of the site's graves. As Virginia senator Mark Warner points out, 'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'"

Comments

That's All?

[Haffner]

Only $5 million? At first I thought this story was about the failure to store data electronically, but now I realize that it's about government efficiency.

Re:That's All?

[Z00L00K]

And there are already systems available that can manage cemeteries so why not purchase one?

Re:That's All?

[jmickle]

Because its government owned and operated and the US government is an utter joke when it comes to financial decisions. We bail banks out so they can throw crazy huge parties with the celebrities while our citizens lose their homes because they cant afford to pay last year's taxes.

Re:That's All?

[Anonymous Coward]

The $5M was used to pay the CEO for thinking about how he might build a team to do that. If you want him to actually hire some programmers, you're going to have to give him more money.

Re:That's All?

[Pete Venkman]

Five million dollars is good, but I bet there are other agencies that could have blown through way more! Anyone remember the story about the NYC project (i think it was a time clock application)?

Re:That's All?

[Anonymous Coward]

You see a hobo on the street corner begging for money every day, claiming that he's down on his luck and can't seem to do anything to change it.
You buy him a brand new house, and GIVE it to him, free and clear, to end his days as a transient.
He then sells the house, and blows all the money on drugs, booze, smokes, and hookers.
You then see him back on the same street corner, begging for money, claiming that he's down on his luck and can't seem to do anything to change it.

The "surprise" ending is that the hobo is the U.S. government, and the money is our taxes. They need to raise them? Like hell they do.

And yes, it was spent on drugs, booze, smokes, and hookers.

Re:That's All?

[Dishevel]

To be fair they are losing the home they couldn't afford to pay for when they bought them hopping the market would go up and they could re-finance.

Re:That's All?

[QuantumRiff]

That was the case for the first few months. But the recession caused lots of layoffs. They shut down a GM plant near me, that had 1200 full time employees. I think you will find that most people used to be able to afford their homes, but now cannot.

But hey, welcome to 2010!

Re:That's All?

[PagosaSam]

I'll translate that app to English for you for only $5.6M USD, delivery in 5 to 7 years. Cash in advance.

Thank you for your business.

Re:That's All?

[Nadaka]

When I was still at Bearingpoint (before they went under), I worked on a project that was at least 400 million in the hole. And the client still wanted to keep changing requirements!

Re:That's All?

[Peach Rings]

I'll better that offer- $6M USD, delivery in 9 to 10 years!

Re:That's All?

[longacre]

Yes, that one is up to $700 million and counting. Pretty impressive waste for a non-Federal project.

Re:That's All?

[westlake]

And there are already systems available that can manage cemeteries so why not purchase one?

Arlington has 300,000 gravesites on 624 acres.

"In addition to in-ground burial, Arlington National Cemetery also has one of the larger columbariums for cremated remains in the country. Four courts are currently in use, each with 5,000 niches. When construction is complete, there will be nine courts with a total of 50,000 niches; capacity for 100,000 remains." Arlington National Cemetery

Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?

Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates.

Re:That's All?

[GoodNicksAreTaken]

They should use their own union labor and quit wasting money by using contractors in the private sector that take the money and run. Whats that? You oppose union labor and paying living wages to keep quality people employed rather than leaving to be contractors? Keeping some dead weight employed at the bottom protected by a bargaining agreement is worse than the dead weight at the top that got there by being the nephew of the boss? Who will then hire his nephew and create dead weight to the bottom of the stack. Of course unions have to report regularly on LM-2 (LM-3, etc) every time they blow their nose to be in compliance with the LMRDA so every bit of corruption leads people to believe unions are totally corrupt. Corruption in the private sector isn't found until an entire industry collapses prompting thorough investigation and after the SCOTUS ruling regarding the honest-services law just made, prosecuting private sector corruption probably becomes more difficult.

Re:That's All?

[D'Sphitz]

$5 million? I'll do it for ONLY $4.5 million!

Stories like this where the government throws $millions around for a simple website or database really piss me off. Maybe there's more to this system than TFA leads me to believe, but from the sounds of it this is a pretty straight forward project, a more reasonable figure would be in the low 6 figures I think (if it includes hardware and manual data entry).

This reminds me of the $18 mil us taxpayers spent on recovery.gov . I've built several bigger and better websites within a month or two with just a small 3 person team, I'm sure many people here have. Did I get $18 million for it? Are you fucking kidding me!? $18,000 would be much closer to reality. I likely won't make $18m in my entire career.

Re:That's All?

[DerekLyons]

Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise - because that's exactly what Arlington is, a bare list of names and dates.

Re:That's All?

[Ephemeriis]

Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?

If that was absolutely the only option available (which it isn't) I'm sure it could be made to. Say the cap is at 10,000 plots... Just create a new cemetery file every 10,000 plots. Certainly not idea... But if you were at all logical in your naming of the individual files it'd likely be easier to find information than digging through the mountain of paper they must have now.

Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates.

Why?

What more information is contained in their records now?

What more information could you want from a cemetery database?

Joe Smith - Plot 117A - Interred on 6/25/2010 - pretty much covers everything the cemetery cares about, doesn't it? More information such as their birth date, date of death, years of service, etc. is probably not the cemetery's problem.

Re:That's All?

[Anonymous Coward]

"400,000 records should be enough for anyone" - Bill

Re:That's All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to downplay historical significance, but it has no relevance to databases. I've managed multi-millions of records for a small company using MSSQL 2000, and with 200+columns in some of those tables. 400k records should be quite trivial from a technology standpoint. A single database should be capable of storing the data for the entire national cemetery system.

It's more a matter of determining what needs to be stored in the database, which is a planning question rather than a tech question. If the off-the-shelf packages are unable to scale to that size, they were designed not to scale (rather than not designed to scale).

Re:That's All?

[Sparr0]

Why do you imply that union-mandated dead weight at the bottom (and, I claim, at every level) is mutually exclusive with neoptistic dead weight at the top?

Re:That's All?

[Rich0]

As another has pointed out - a few hundred k records is a trivial problem for a database. You could probably do this in MS Access (though I wouldn't recommend it).

It isn't like Arlington has to deal with 10k bodies drifting in and out of the cemetery every hour or something like that. This is just a big table indexed for easy searching by name/location, and it gets a couple of inserts per day.

If this takes more than a day or two to put together, somebody is doing something wrong.

Re:That's All?

[Gulthek]

Good gravy man, that's like table creation 101. A few hundred thousand records with mostly read operations, rare updates, occasional inserts? That problem has been solved, thousands of times already.

Just grab some digital collections software (Omeka) or customize some Drupal or code up a quick model in Rails/Django and you're in business. Omeka would probably be the quickest startup and provide the capability for tons of rich metadata.

No want/need for a public web interface? Don't set one up. Done. Lunch time!

Except for the data entry, that's going to be some fun data entry.

Re:That's All?

[treeves]

Bingo. That's the key. A metric buttload of data entry and verification.

Re:That's All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear LORD! That could end up taking MEGABYTES. My Droid phone is full of music right now, I'd probably have to delete up to SEVERAL mp3's to make room!

Re:That's All?

[westlake]

What more information could you want from a cemetery database?
Joe Smith - Plot 117A - Interred on 6/25/2010 - pretty much covers everything the cemetery cares about, doesn't it? More information such as their birth date, date of death, years of service, etc. is probably not the cemetery's problem.

Arlington is a national memorial park.

There are many things the visitor or historian will want to know:

For example, when were the first women buried here - not a dependents but as soldiers?

Re:That's All?

[Z00L00K]

And there are already systems available that can manage cemeteries so why not purchase one?

Arlington has 300,000 gravesites on 624 acres.

"In addition to in-ground burial, Arlington National Cemetery also has one of the larger columbariums for cremated remains in the country. Four courts are currently in use, each with 5,000 niches. When construction is complete, there will be nine courts with a total of 50,000 niches; capacity for 100,000 remains." Arlington National Cemetery

Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?

Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates.

Considering that it's a small number compared to many other data collections in computing it shouldn't be a big issue.

Even in computing solutions during the 80's that was a manageable number of records so it shouldn't pose a big problem today unless you run hardware from the early 80's.

Re:That's All?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Uhhhh, my wordpress database has more entries than that. Why should a few million entries be a problem for any database program?

Re:That's All?

[martin-boundary]

Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?

Bah, that's easy with a bitfield! You can fit 300,000 graves in about 37kB, if you set each grave to 1 if it is filled, and 0 it it's empty. I've got an old DOS computer somewhere in the basement that you can borrow if you like, mind you the '7' key is a bit whacky, but it'll be ok if you just remember to input each dead guy in base 7.

Re:That's All?

[NateTech]

Okay, you add sex as a field in the table. Whoop dee do. Got a better example?

$20 says the whole thing's mired in what's "public" and what's "family private" data... behind the scenes.

Are you supposed to know what sex someone is by looking at their grave marker if you didn't know them?

Re:That's All?

[Ephemeriis]

Are you supposed to know what sex someone is by looking at their grave marker if you didn't know them?

See, that's kind of my point here.

Anything much beyond what's on the grave marker itself is feature creep.

Sure, maybe they want to know when the first woman was buried there... If it was any other cemetery on the planet, how would you do that? You'd have to dig through historic records - birth certificates, death certificates, etc. It isn't like that'll be clearly labeled on each tombstone. And if you want to make sure they were a soldier, instead of a dependent? You'll need to check military records as well. And if you want to know where or why they died? Or how they served their country? Or what they did with themselves before or after service? That's not going to be on the tombstone either.

Sure, it might be nice to have all this stuff available quickly and easily because Arlington is of historic importance... But is it genuinely necessary? Do they actually have all that information available quickly and easily right now?

Or is this more an issue of "it's a computer, it should know all that!"

If what you want is to modernize Arlington's records, then I'm sure there's plenty of off-the-shelf software available that will do very nearly everything you need it to.

If you want to create some kind of historic database of anything even remotely interesting about anyone even remotely related to somebody buried in Arlington - you aren't looking at just modernizing Arlington's records anymore. You're looking at a sophisticated system that'll have to reference all sorts of random information that's currently scattered all over the place. The kind of system that causes people on here to turn pale and start muttering about Big Brother.

Re:That's All?

[Richy_T]

At least it wasn't wasted then.

Re:That's All?

[turbidostato]

"Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?"

Being that all in all it means less than a million rows I'd bet even an Access "database" would cope with it.

Data is ethics agnostic: that Arlington's list of names and situations pose a big emotional value to you adds nothing to data numbers and complexity.

"Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates."

Even then, that's exactly what Arlington is.

Re:That's All?

[tibit]

LOL. That's *nothing* as far as "scale" goes -- what's 300,000 records these days... They managed to bungle things so bad that they would spend less money and be more efficient had they used something like MySql or Postgresql, and taught everyone involved how to type SQL queries by hand.

Re:That's All?

[NateTech]

As if the NSA doesn't already have such a system? ;-)

Accountability

[Pete Venkman]

Where's accountability when 5 million gets spent and nobody can even make something as simple as a SPREADSHEET?

Re:Accountability

[MozeeToby]

It's amazing, $5 million spent and no progress made on something that you could probably do with a few grand in software, and few grand in hardware and setup, and volunteer labor for the data entry. You could make it part of the tour for crying out loud, 'sit down and enter a few names as you go through', double or triple completed to ensure accuracy of course.

Re:Accountability

[gknoy]

They should use Google Earth or something and tag each plot with GPS coordinates as well as who's in it.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're having trouble getting permission from the residents...

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a job for interns.

"Fetch me coffee. While you're at it, go out and record every name and plot out there in the 90-degree heat and 87-percent humidity, then put it in a basic access database. Oh, and I need it by 3 on Wednesday so we can bring it live for the site. Thanks."

Re:Accountability

[vjg]

Just the Republicans and Independents. The Democrats can still vote.

Re:Accountability

[timeOday]

From the article, it's not correct to say no progress was made. For example, they digitized the microfiche. However, they didn't index them correctly.

IMHO, this whole issue is philosophically interesting. I think it is a mistake to try and indefinitely preserve the bodies of everyone who ever lived. Rather than be a rotting corpse, I would rather come back sooner as pine needles in an alpine forest and affect the future through writings, or photography, or my descendents.

Of course, none of that really pertains to the issue at hand - if somebody's job is to manage a cemetery in a certain way, they should.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

A spreadsheet? Seriously? WTF, you're just one column sort away from losing data integrity. It's how every Excel file dies.

Re:Accountability

[Red Flayer]

Rather than be a rotting corpse, I would rather come back sooner as pine needles in an alpine forest and affect the future through writings, or photography, or my descendents.

So at the root of things, you'd be pining for your descendants in the woods instead of your descendants pining for you in a cemetary?

Fair enough. But wouldn't you appreciate the thought of your descendants sprucing up your gravesite in memoriam?

Re:Accountability

[whit3]

Actually, the specifics that were mentioned in the article indicated
that lots of the money was spent to make computer-readable data
of the old records (Arlington has over two centuries of records). That
might actually be worth what they paid.

We all think of 'making a database' as the center of this kind
of problem, but IT ISN'T. Pretty certainly, the monies
spent weren't spent on building softwares... and the
employees didn't, in their everyday work, feel the need to
get every shovel-pusher a computer terminal, they didn't
think they WANTED software. They just wanted to 'stay
organized'. In the absence of a computerized system,
and in comparison with other cemeteries that DID get
their records onto database computers, that isn't
working. Something has to change.

Army oversight of the cemetery operations was limited, they
didn't worry as long as the visitor experience was good. So,
naturally, the administrators ignored everything other than
the visible tokens of the cemetery operation.

Re:Accountability

[sh00z]

volunteer labor for the data entry.

Heck, for those of us who can't travel, we'll still contribute for free. Put up scanned pages on the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

The jackasses were moving existing remains, and putting new remains into old graves, and putting landscaping on top of existing graves.

When your problem is that the guy with the backhoe hasn't been trained to speak up if there's already an existing grave where he's been told to dig a new grave, the solution isn't "hire some geeks to program some computers".

The solution is to create an environment where everyone who works there respects the dead, and to make sure that procedures enable that respect. It's not an IT problem at all.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing? Really? I'd call it business as usual for the government.

Fool me once...

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the world of govt and IT consultants. I did not believe such incompetence was possible until I worked in it for a few years. Blowing $5-10M on the most trivial of applications (many abandoned) is commonplace.

Re:Accountability

[Martin Blank]

Ancestry.com has something similar for its scanned documents. I've corrected numerous census and draft registration records, with a notification anywhere from a few days to a few weeks later that the changes had been accepted into the database, presumably after confirmation.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, I worked for a defense contractor for about 6 years, and while management were a bunch of cynical bastards just going through the motions and keeping the gravy train moving, that's all they were and then us developers really wanted to do something useful and good. But the govies, who make the decisions about what is and sometimes how it is developed, were teh utter fail.

The people the government had in charge of leading these projects had not the first clue about what they were doing, and would change their minds literally in time intervals of two weeks. I just wanted to build some freaking systems, my bosses just wanted to keep us under contract, and the govies just didn't give a flying fsck about anything, including the money being spent and wasted.

Re:Accountability

[timeOday]

Fair enough. But wouldn't you appreciate the thought of your descendants sprucing up your gravesite in memoriam?

They could always go hiking and pee on my stump.

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd be pining for your descendants in the woods

what if i want to pine for the fjords?

Re:Accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll get health "care" and financial "reform" right...

You seem to be suffering from the delusion that government is about running things efficiently. It's not. It's about keeping people employed. As stupid and lazy as they may be, the most important thing is to keep them employed...

P.S. - Here's a picture of the Progressive messiah with a fucking fly on his face: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//100622/480/urn_publicid_ap_org66491abceb6647608552782eda77ca57/

Tell me about it!

[Late Adopter]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

Re:Tell me about it!

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

Corporal Tables, we call him.

Re:Tell me about it!

[bit9]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

Oh wait. It's a trick question, right? Isn't it Grant?

Re:Tell me about it!

[Naked Jaybird]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

And that's the answer to their security question when they forget their password!

Re:Tell me about it!

[DIplomatic]

Corporal Tables, we call him.

With the computers there as old as I think they are, the joke is probably Corporal Deltree

Re:Tell me about it!

[Chris Mattern]

If only he were. They spent $5 million dollars and they DON'T EVEN HAVE A DATABASE. At all. Of anything.

Re:Tell me about it!

[hoggoth]

I hope they don't lose the records of my grandfather "a';DROP TABLE users;"
Good ol' Droppy we called him.

Re:Tell me about it!

[syousef]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

Corporal Tables, we call him.

-- Okay time for your morning pushups:
Drop Corporate Tables; -- drop!

Re:Tell me about it!

[idontgno]

They had a database. One careless SQL injection later and they had "DROP'ped TABLES;" and that was that for the database.

link, if you didn't recognize the joke.

Re:Tell me about it!

[user-hostile]

They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

Tomb of the unknown soldier + MS Access = Invalid Use of Null error.

$5 million is a good deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

The government gets huge economies of scale. That's why we should have them in charge of the health care system. Clearly we will be able to save substantially more money than the private sector once the profit motive has been removed.

Re:$5 million is a good deal.

[Klinky]

Yep, private industry has never wasted a cent. Their track record is spot on.

http://it-project-failures.blogspot.com/

Re:$5 million is a good deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

>That's why we should have them in charge of the health care system.

Whoever fails in the health care system would be a new resident in the cemetery. Think of it as the bit bucket when the patient kicks the bucket.

Re:$5 million is a good deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no incentive to save money when the organizaton in question can simply take more from our paychecks directly.

Cut them some slack...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arlington National Cemetery is not an organization that can afford to take the risk of having their servers turned into zombies lightly...

Re:Cut them some slack...

[jzarling]

This is pretty funny, if I had mod points you would get one.

Re:Cut them some slack...

[Nadaka]

tell me about it. The only thing worse than a zombie is a zombie with stealth and combat training.

Re:Cut them some slack...

[idontgno]

True. I hate fighting packs of zombines more than anything else, except for maybe Hunter packs.

durrrrr.....

[Anonymous Coward]

sacred?

Where do I sign up for that job?

[bit9]

I'll do it for half that amount!

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll do it for 1/2 what you'll pay this guy.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[baKanale]

Anonymous Coward? You'll never pass the background check!

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll design the system for free if they provide the hardware, minimal software licenses and the labor to manually enter the old records in. Or if in a standard format, scan them in.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the government operates upon the flawed theory that "if it costs more it must be better."

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[masmullin]

This can reasonably be done for $125,000 (two interns and a lead) and be finished in 3 months.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[ArsonSmith]

This is for a government project.

I'll do it for twice that amount!!

Bet I get it before you do.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you are joking, but this situation seems like a RIPE opportunity for the free and open source community to get together and offer their services for something useful. Instead of just whining and complaining about how incompetent the government is all the time, why not step up to the plate and PROVE it.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[istartedi]

I'm pretty sure some veterans would do it for NOTHING if you simply put the word out.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[balbus000]

"Arson Smith bid twice that amount, I'm sure he'll do a better job."
"...isn't there something fishy about the way his name sounds though..."
"Hush you, I've made my decision!"
"..."

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll do it for 10x the price and give you, Mr. Senator, half of it as a generous campaign donation.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[rongage]

Probably because we don't have a requirements doc of any sort here. I would be quite surprised if they weren't trying to do something highly fancy (web/AJAX front end, GIS tie in, method of attaching scans of important documents to each burial (birth records, military records, death cert, etc...), method of attaching pictures to each burial, public access with requisite security and high availability, offsite data replication and encryption (EMC/NetApp), distributed database with full read/write capabilities across all nodes (MySQL probably wouldn't cut it here though it might with DRDB behind it).

I don't know - but I would bet that this really isn't that trivial a problem - especially the GIS tie in part (drawing maps/plots on a screen in an accurate manner).

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Barny]

Interesting, and tell me, do you happen to have a DoD clearance? If so I may have some more work for you.

Re:Where do I sign up for that job?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Reggie on form the corner making me up one right now for $100.

How Sad...

[Maximus633]

For all of our soldiers who have earned the right to be buried there and we can't even get a decent IT system in place to help people or keep such important records.

To our Fallen Hero's.... I am sorry.

I do think it is time that companies and even people stop being so damn greedy and do their jobs. Granted we may not have the insight as to what is happening directly but I am left to wonder who is asleep at the controls on this one. We have private sector people doing jobs that are comparable size to this job and I am sure 5 million dollars would have paid for their time and a mojito and Starbucks coffee whenever they wanted it. I think it is time to disband our Government and reform with people that a hell of a lot more honest then some of the guys we have in there now. Sorry to make this political but the fact remains that someone is not doing their job. Any person's loved ones are important to them but a person who defended our rights and country (regardless if the war is right or wrong to which those that feel it is wrong it is time to bitch at the civilian leaders case and point would be the recent Gen. McCrystal deal.) and we can't honor them with keeping accurate records and spending money WISELY when it comes to their final resting place. Sad...

Re:How Sad...

[hax4bux]

I have worked as a DoD contractor and I am a vet. I agree it is sad, but failure on these projects is the routine outcome.

Navigating the federal procurement process is a nightmare you have to experience to believe.

Those infamous $300 hammers are a bargain: at least they got delivered and performed the task.

Re:How Sad...

[couchslug]

The management at Arlington appears to have been too old. Computer literacy should be required of all Federal job holders and they should be shitcanned if they cannot adapt.

Hold them to the standards expected of the military, which is to do your job or suffer appropriate punishment.

Re:How Sad...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that you'll find that the business of finding and recruiting honest men is harder than it looks. Arguably, most of political philosophy throughout history has basically just been work on assorted toy problems that arise out of our failure to solve that one.

Even worse, when it comes to complex projects(and IT counts), even a supply of honest men isn't good enough to assure success. Malicious actors can definitely poison the best of projects; but good people sail projects on to the rocks all the time.

Re:How Sad...

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

Amen to that, brother. When I was in the Navy we would go through the 'prices' of things that we would req. We attempted to work out the actual cost of the items, including delivery to our ship. We could never get any number close to what the supply system claimed was the cost of the item. I'm talking $5000 for a PCB with 25 year old components on it.

Re:How Sad...

[QuantumRiff]

You know.. Some of those records are over a hundred years old. I dare you to show me any kind of electronic record from more than 30 years ago. Go ahead, I'll wait while you try to find a reel to reel, and a system to use it.

To modernize they need to re-enter everything, then ensure that backups are carefully followed, then they have to replace all the technology every few years, and pay support. Then they have to convert the data when new format/versions come out. That is a ton of Money and Time.

A Vet teacher had a sign on a door that pretty much summed up the Marine Corps feelings on Technology.
A computer with a bullet hole in it is a paperweight. A map with a bullet hole is still a map.

Re:How Sad...

[Chris Mattern]

I'm talking $5000 for a PCB with 25 year old components on it.

That might almost be reasonable--that sort of thing gets expensive when they're not making them anymore.

Re:How Sad...

[timeOday]

Hold them to the standards expected of the military, which is to do your job or suffer appropriate punishment.

From the article: "the Army has reprimanded Superintendent John C. Metzler Jr., who is retiring July 2, and [No. 2 administrator] Higginbotham, who was placed on administrative leave pending a disciplinary review." So, yeah, they're shitcanned. I'm sure some will say that's not enough, though keep in mind they were also juggling many other responsibilities besides IT upgrades.

Re:How Sad...

[spamking]

It's not only the cost of the items due to the markup it is the fact that there is so much red tape just to make a simple purchase that would make the general public's head explode.

As a federal employee I can't book my own flight and save some time and money . . . I have to use "City Pairs" at a higher cost and less flexibility. It drives me up the wall.

The systems we use to create travel orders and request payment vouchers is so clunky and takes so much time to work through most folks could've driven to their destination by the time they are done. This along with the systems we use to track procurement and training cost so much money that we pretty much have to stick with them to make it even remotely resemble a decent expense.

Re:How Sad...

[Pinball Wizard]

A computer with an offsite backup still preserves data when the building is bombed, burned down, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. A map in such a building will be gone forever. Sayonara, data. Your Vet teacher and apparently the entire Marine Corps have it wrong.

Re:How Sad...

[operagost]

There are no bullets flying at Arlington, and there are a hell of a lot of computers on warships and submarines.

Re:How Sad...

[ISoldat53]

The US can't even take care of our vets when they are alive. How do you expect them to care when a vet dies?

Re:How Sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

federal procurement process is a nightmare you have to experience to believe

The sad thing is it could be better. In fact it could be awesome. Instead if you automate anything you might accidentally put 20 people out of a job. You cant have that.

I can not tell you the number of fellow IT workers I have come across that built working systems that were scrapped exactly for that reason. Instead we have mediocre fiefdoms that can not say exactly what they want but know they want it. Even though the organization down the hall has exactly what they need and ready to go and doesnt really need it anymore. So org 1 will go and rebuild a similar non compatible system and org 2 will retire theirs and build another similar but non compatible system.

Re:How Sad...

[MartijnL]

You have got to be kidding me. Any decent storage system can do synchronous offsite data replication nowadays and for cemetary data I'm guessing the I/O requirement is pretty low....... Add a decent tape library at both ends with secure storage in some DoD extra secure vault somewhere (hell, put it at NORAD for all I care) and you're done. First order of business for them is to get an electronic backup of the physical records which can be done in frigging Excel 2010 if need be. Then start thinking about fancy features like GPS tagging etc. And those features are not even reaching the boundaries of current IT capabilities either.

Re:How Sad...

[WillRobinson]

Currently working on a display for older tanks, price is somewhere in the 100K range for the first 10 units, the price drops on additional ones. We had to redesign everything to meet the old spec.

We could have done it for half the cost if they would have changed the system feeding the information to the display.

The old display was not near a crisp as the new display, and was made with obsolete parts.

But this is better than buying a new tank, so in the end, repair may be cheaper than a whole new system.

Re:How Sad...

[Chris Mattern]

So, yeah, they're shitcanned.

One is being allowed to fall back on his full retirement bennies, and the other is being paid to not work. Yep, that's some kind of punishment, there. (Granted, the one on administrative leave might wind up catching it later. Then again, he might not.) Compare this to the worker who tried to blow the whistle on them a few years ago. They FIRED her ass.

Re:How Sad...

[TooMuchToDo]

Glad to hear the DOD is just as bad as the DOE. On the other hand, OMG so much waste =(

Re:How Sad...

[TooMuchToDo]

As long as that computer still is working though, you have a much better chance of not being subjected to friendly fire. Paper map? not so much

Re:How Sad...

[TooMuchToDo]

Different environments have different requirements. Why can't you have both a laptop and a map in the field?

Re:How Sad...

[John Hasler]

It is quite possible (and was once quite routine) to maintain offsite backups of paper records.

Re:How Sad...

[The_mad_linguist]

Here you go!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Lenna.png

Re:How Sad...

[HBI]

The sign was referring to tactical systems. Try doing your offsite backup from Afghanistan. Using satellite comms, at best. Beside which, if your system is the only computer you have, you're out of action until you get another, regardless of what backup you have.

The Marine Corps has it right, you have it wrong.

Re:How Sad...

[oatworm]

Yep - government at all levels is full of stuff like that. Want to know why?

Transparency.

I'm dead serious. When you're dealing with the private sector, the end result is (usually) far more important than the process. Using your above example, the goal is to get you on a plane that takes you to the destination the company wants you to go to - as long as you get there, the only people that care how it gets paid for are the accountants. In government, however, it's much more important that we avoid fraud and waste in the process of purchasing plane tickets than it is that we actually get you on a plane. Government has to make sure that the process is "clean" and "transparent", meaning that you didn't purchase the plane ticket from a vendor because they bribed you, lobbied you, gave you special favors, or otherwise did anything that might give themselves an "unfair advantage" over other airline ticket vendors in the procurement process. Once the government has established that everything is clean and above board through the use of over 200 years of accumulated "rooting out waste" tradition, then and only then can the government actually think about buying an airline ticket for you.

Coincidentally, this is why government-provided goods and services drive a lot of libertarians absolutely nuts. It's not that government can't do the job - of course it can. It does it right now in a variety of areas (police, fire, schools, etc.). However, once you're done dealing with all of the other airline vendors' lobbying (we have to have a "level playing field", whether the vendors are at the same "level" or not), politicians looking to score cheap points by "eliminating waste and fraud", and just general bureaucratic inertia, something that should be fairly simple and straightforward (buy an airline ticket) becomes an inefficient multistage bureaucratic maze that lacks flexibility and costs ten times as much as it would if you or I grabbed our credit cards and bought a plane ticket ourselves.

Re:How Sad...

[Hatta]

I dare you to show me any kind of electronic record from more than 30 years ago.

There's a bunch of them right here.

Re:How Sad...

[DerekLyons]

A computer with an offsite backup still preserves data when the building is bombed, burned down, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. A map in such a building will be gone forever.

In my world, it's trivially easy to make backup copies of paper data - photocopying, microfilming, xeroxing, or scanning and storing digital copies. (Or hell, even carbon copies.) In fact, people have been using various such methods of backing up important data (and storing it offsite) for centuries.
 
In your world people seem to forgotten how to do this. I'm glad I don't live in your world.
 

Your Vet teacher and apparently the entire Marine Corps have it wrong.

You need to familiarize yourself with the technology in question before calling people wrong. Just because it isn't digital doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Re:How Sad...

[nametaken]

C'mon people, this is pretty straightforward. These are two very different things, and both are best for their jobs.

A map is more useful to someone trudging around in the sandbox with 80lbs of gear because it's lighter, the battery isn't going to die, it isn't going to break if you leave it in your pocket and it's invulnerable to software bugs or fried parts. Also, you can hand it to anyone else with basic map reading skills without the added encumbrance of old-timers that don't want your newfangled doohickey.

A large data management task at an office somewhere is obviously is a job for databases and offsite backups. Paper records should still be kept in some vault somewhere to preserve them, but employees, guests, etc. should be working with a database almost exclusively.

Re:How Sad...

[couchslug]

Doing BOTH would make sense, as they are not mutually exclusive.

Once plots are inventoried, make sure the STONE INVENTORY MARKERS MATCH WHAT'S UNDER THEM.

Re:How Sad...

[dangitman]

The Marine Corps has it right, you have it wrong.

Here's a thought: perhaps there are valid points and drawbacks for both methods? Shocking, I know!

Re:How Sad...

[Mr. Foogle]

A Vet teacher had a sign on a door that pretty much summed up the Marine Corps feelings on Technology.
A computer with a bullet hole in it is a paperweight. A map with a bullet hole is still a map.

Don't that too seriously. In 1992 the Marines had one of the largest Banyan VINES networks in the world. Single sign-on, directory services, printing, email, file storage. We could take all that to the field, and did on a regular basis. VINES went to war in Desert Storm/Shield.

They've only improved on that legacy since I EASd.

Technology, used correctly, is force multiplier. We know this.

Re:How Sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a technical architect on an electronic document management system for the federal government that contains some records going back 70 or 80 years. We have a file format that is approved by NARA and won't be changing anytime soon. I will say that the staff involved to QA and verify the few fields that are completely digitized outnumbered the development team by at least a factor of 10. They will not need to replace the software technology anytime soon, but they will probably need a new storage architecture (and therefore new storage hardware) soon as the thing grows by 2 TB a month and currently occupies approximately 50 TB.

Re:How Sad...

[winwar]

"To modernize they need to re-enter everything, then ensure that backups are carefully followed,..."

True. But they have to do that anyway. Grave markers can be wrong and they have limited information anyway.

"...then they have to replace all the technology every few years, and pay support. Then they have to convert the data when new format/versions come out. That is a ton of Money and Time."

Utter bullshit. The data doesn't change. It isn't complex. There is no need to make it so. Map the site, input it into a GIS, use your database of choice, keep it backed up and you are good to go. Hell, since this is the military, keep paper copies.

The project is difficult because of the time and effort required to accurately input all of the data into computer form. Compared to that tedium, the hardware and support side is EASY.

Re:How Sad...

[1s44c]

You know.. Some of those records are over a hundred years old. I dare you to show me any kind of electronic record from more than 30 years ago.

I have plenty actually. It gets moved to a different physical medium every few years but the data itself is up to 35 years old.

Re:How Sad...

[strikethree]

Yes, I am sure that the Marines can easily have a new computer delivered and the off-site backup accessible in 5 minutes while the mortar rounds are landing in their encampment. A map with a bullet hole in it is still good enough to call in an artillery or air strike. The computer with a bullet hole in it is good for hitting you in the head for thinking the environment they work in has spare computers and data connection laying around.

No, I am not honestly mad at you. After all, you have never had mortar rounds or rockets flying over your head before. Your point is valid when talking about being on a stable base well away from enemy lines. :)

Regards,
strike

Re:How Sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paper can also be backed up offsite. This is what was done in administration for years when records were not on electronic databases. While I agree that a well-thought move to computer records would be a good thing for this cemetery, presenting it as "just a coffee spill away" from catastrophe is probably totally misleading.

Re:How Sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

A TANDEM computer with a bullet hole in it is still a computer. Buy better computers.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1.html : 7 July 1969, well over 40 years ago and I did one Google search to find it

http://www.freereg.org.uk/ : Birth (well, baptism) and death records from before your country even existed. Transcribed and made searchable on the web, using digital information.

So long as you conceive of a "30 year old record" as being stored on 30 year old media, you are misunderstanding the whole point of digital information.

The funny thing is, the Marine Corps does understand this stuff. Check the dog tags on the next dead marine you see, that's digital information. The alternative solution would be an embossed photograph of the marine's face or his signature, neither of which would be easy to match or robust against the kind of mistreatment which can happen to a body in war.

Re:How Sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't read any further than:

In government, however, it's much more important that we avoid fraud and waste

Then I made a serious effort to continue reading, but again you shot me down with:

government ... does it right now in a variety of areas (police, fire, schools, etc.)

Please tell me you are joking / being sarcastic ?

Does it really matter?

[Hatta]

They're just bones. Does it matter which bones are where? Change the name from Arlington National Cemetery to Arlington National Memorial and you don't even need the bones at all.

Re:Does it really matter?

[swb]

As cynical as it seems, there is something to that.

I'd wager that a lot of the graves belong to people whose living relatives/descendants have no idea they have a grave there and thus the grave is really only symbolic as part of the visual sea of gravestones.

And then there's the idea that, well, barring the dead walking again, none of those guys are walking again.

The other thing I think of is -- as long as the paper records are maintained (eg, copies stored offsite, new copies made periodically, etc), if they have managed to run the facility for this long, how "necessary" is a computerized database beyond sounding necessary?

How hard is it really to setup a MySQL database?

[Fallen Kell]

I mean, really. You can setup a redundant/distributed from bare-metal to running in about 6 hours (including full disk scans). Add a cron job to do a dump every night and even just write that to DVD. Creating a database shouldn't be that big a deal. Even designing a web based front-end to search the records and input new ones wouldn't take more than a couple weeks to hash out and implement. Will it be the flashiest thing, no, but it will work and be better than pen-paper. Now, importing all those paper records, that will be the hard part....

If all else fails, get out the camera

[wjh31]

take photo of all the graves with their details on and people can browse through them in context, tag them with details etc. I as a mere amature put together a composite image of the 'tablets of the missing' in the American cemetery in Cambridge,UK which lists the names of a few thousand lost personel. One person has already contacted me to say they found their uncle listed.

Re:If all else fails, get out the camera

[plover]

That sounds reasonable, until you see Arlington and grasp just how very, very big it really is. There are 300,000 graves on the site. That is a huge task, and would require many people. For a place such as Arlington, volunteers would be plentiful. But even organizing a crowd like that is difficult, much less getting them all to perform a specific task correctly.

While it might sound efficient to put an HD video camera in the hands of a rider and have a 4-wheeler zip up and down the rows of the cemetery, it would not suit the dignity of the place.

Hmm... I bet someone could build a gravestone locator that watched a stream of video, identified the markers using some image recognition software, and targeted them with a motorized-mount SLR with a zoom lens. (It sounds rather a lot like a project I've recently seen on hackaday.com, except substituting markers for little brothers and cameras for chain-fed nerf guns.) By sticking to the roads, it wouldn't even have to be an undignified vehicle zooming around the place. And the regularity of the tombstones would permit automated searching for missing information, ensuring it was properly collected.

Yeah, it's doable.

Re:If all else fails, get out the camera

[John Hasler]

> take photo of all the graves with their details

How do you know that the markings on the stone are correct?

Re:If all else fails, get out the camera

[Barny]

Well, from TFA they have at least digitised the microfiche, so now it just needs to be dumped into a database, have a nice search-able front end added, maybe even give the very nice people at google a call to get a high res satellite pic taken with links on each grave and memorial that go strait to a web front-end on the DB, heck see if they will bring a streetview car through so you can "walk the cemetery" online.

All this shouldn't have taken more than $5M, but it looks like it will.

So?

[Red4man]

It's not like the dead are going to complain about it anytime soon.

Re:So?

[XanC]

I'd like to complain about my money being wasted.

Re:So?

[Red4man]

No, you can't. Because with the same mouth you bitch and moan about government wasting your money, you scream and holler for more of that same government.

The Cognitive Dissonance is breathtaking.

Plus, it totally gives me an erection. Can you send your mom over to take care of it?

Should be a fairly simple project.

[jzarling]

All the funny comments aside I think this is kind of appalling. This should be a fairly simple project. If I was in a position to make some unilateral decisions, I would ask the National Archives for some assistance in creating the electronic records system.
It might not be within the strictest interpretation of their (NA's) charter, but I think its certainly within the spirit of their mission.

Re:Should be a fairly simple project.

[KarrdeSW]

It might not be within the strictest interpretation of their (NA's) charter, but I think its certainly within the spirit of their mission.

THIS does not happen enough in the Federal Government. 95% of the time when an agency is in need of a skillset that is outside its purview (or sometimes within its purview, but present in a different department), it contracts it out to some third party vendor with questionable skills and typically high prices. Every federal agency should be ready to consult for other agencies when its primary skills are in need, but it almost never happens that way.

Re:Should be a fairly simple project.

[Barny]

Those are dangerous ideas, what you propose would absolutely destroy the companies and service providers who help keep our countries running.. err, well linping.

They are the glue that binds the gears of modern government!

Even the government can do better than this

[Chris Mattern]

The article notes that the Veterans' Administration *has* computerized graves registration elsewhere, successfully, covering ten times the number of graves at one-third the cost of this utterly failed effort.

I can get it done

[masmullin]

I can do it for $125,000 and be finished in 3 months.

Re:I can get it done

[Anonymous Coward]

I can do your mom for $50 and be done in 2 minutes.

Re:I can get it done

[Barny]

You miscalculated by an order of magnitude on both figures.

I can do your mom for $500 and be done in 20 seconds

Oops, I meant the parent.

I can do it for $1,250,000 and be finished in 30 months

Or maybe that should be 2 orders of magnitude, this is a public sector contract after all...

Just shows the level of corruption...

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Get money allocated for government project nobody is going to follow up on (Some nice conservative senator arranged this one, I'm guessing).
Step 2: Channel money to "friends" who are "contractors."
Step 3: Take money back from "friends" (minus their "fee" for "work performed.")
Step 4: Squirrel money away in some nice little Caribbean tax haven.
Step 5: Have passport at the ready.

Give me half a million

[richardkelleher]

and I'll get some friends together and have a usable system up in a week. (Hardware extra!)

Re:Give me half a million

[Russianspi]

Heck, for that price, I'd do it alone, and I'd throw in the hardware as an act of goodwill!

Re:Give me half a million

[richardkelleher]

I couldn't do it myself in a week, just too slow I guess. And no, if I have to share the money with other people, they can buy the hardware from other funds. Besides they would want military hardware and that will cost $1,000,000! Or more!

stone age

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they put a stone with your name on your grave. No need for it.

Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing

[syousef]

Where's accountability when 5 million gets spent and nobody can even make something as simple as a SPREADSHEET?

Clearly you don't work in or understand IT. First there have to be meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. First at management level to initiate the project. Then detailed meetings to set up staffing and outline goals. Then middle management needs to be appointed (more meetings) so that they can flesh out those goals in more detail (more meetings). Of course this is after HR recruits the middle management. The middle management goes through the same process to recruit actual staff. Then management meets with staff that provide feedback on those tasks "No I'm sorry you can't magically walk around with a laptop and scanner and have it absorb names off the gravestones. No there's no technology to do that on the horizon". Then middle management needs to report back to senior management (did I mention meetings?) and senior management needs to meet separately to decide what it means to the project. At this point all those discussions will get confusing so will need to be summarised and corrected. Only now can we start to see a plan coming into being (drafted by middle management, approved by senior management. You guessed it more meetings). At this point work may commence but if it is it will typically be halted by a new priority/requirement being pulled out of senior management's rectum^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ahem I mean coming to light. This will totally screw up every agreement made about the direction and even nature of the work, which will require more meetings at all levels to sort out.

Oh and don't be fooled this happens in industry as well as government. Privitising just adds another layer to all this mess and provides another opportunity for waste each time someone changes their mind or adds an unreasonable or ill thought through requirement.

$5 million is nothing. The fact that an intelligent 6th grader could do better is by the by. it's not how the world works.

Similar Story

[mpapet]

Computers aren't necessarily the answer to every problem. I heard this story on NPR and part of the uproar is some people aren't buried where they should be. No computer will fix that. Quite disrespectful, but I'm hardly surprised.

In my younger days I wore many hats at a start-up and one of those hats was logistics. We had parts inventory at a local freight company for free because they did lots of business with our assembler.

I go in to do a cycle count one day and the guy pulls out a notebook and gives it to me before my count, telling me it's all in there. You know what? It was. He had dozens of notebooks. One for each assembler customer. This guys niche was basically to segregate the shipping paperwork from inventory accounting. It wasn't a one-man shop either. He made it work and work well. Most of the LDL shippers use grand-unified logistics applications with double and triple entry labor that would make his kind of service an expensive proposition.

Re:Similar Story

[g1zmo]

Salon.com has been doing an investigative series on Arlington National Cemetery for the last couple of years, and there's quite a lot of shocking, saddening, and downright infuriating stuff they've dug up (pun not intended).

Pffff

[BitHive]

Haven't you read any of the other posts? This is an easy problem, all they need is a MySQL database!

Re:Pffff

[John Hasler]

> ...all they need is a MySQL database!

Wrong. PostgreSQL.

Simple solution

[Goetterdaemmerung]

"We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled"

Doesn't this apply to databases also?

Both paper and data needs proper backups. Perhaps in this case a copy machine and some interns would fit the realistic need vs an elaborate electronic system.

Irrelevant quotation

[AthanasiusKircher]

'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'

This is not an IT problem. This is a basic information storage problem dealing with backup procedure. If you're a major organization and you don't have copies of your records, whether paper copies, microfiche copies (which seems to be the case here), or electronic ones, you're vulnerable.

Similarly, IT doesn't necessarily solve this problem. If you digitize all the records to a single server and don't make proper backups, you could still be one fire or flood (or even a coffee) away from losing the records.

(Btw, I do realize that original paper records may have some value as historical artifacts themselves. But those should be in an archive somewhere protected from floods, fires, and errant cups of coffee, while people accessing these records on a daily basis should be using copies, whether digital or microfiche or whatever.)

Re:Irrelevant quotation

[PPH]

It certainly is an IT problem. Taking a big picture view of IT, it includes such things as data integrity, security, disaster recovery. And it touches on all aspects of the systems architecture, from applications down to the sheet metal.

One could even argue that IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies.

Re:Irrelevant quotation

[AthanasiusKircher]

It certainly is an IT problem. Taking a big picture view of IT, it includes such things as data integrity, security, disaster recovery. And it touches on all aspects of the systems architecture, from applications down to the sheet metal.

I'm not arguing that backup isn't an IT problem. I'm saying that if whether you are a high-tech organization with electronic records or a medieval church with paper records vulnerable to fire, you need to deal with backup. In other words, backup isn't a problem unique to IT.

One could even argue that IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies.

Well, one could, if one doesn't subscribe to the common definition of IT.

Yes, one could understand "information technology" to mean any technology dealing with information transfer, in which case, you're right. But that's not what IT typically means. Do a Google search on the term -- it generally has to do with computer, network infrastructure, etc. (I can't believe I'm saying this on Slashdot.)

While in this case, the problem may be similar, the fact that you didn't bother to make more than one copy of a microfiche when you created them from the original documents in the first place is not an "IT problem." It's just not considering the basic issue of redundancy -- a problem that has much broader applications than just IT.

Re:Irrelevant quotation

[AthanasiusKircher]

By the way, if you'd argue that "IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies," you might appreciate this, a recreated version of the first "help desk call":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

Re:Irrelevant quotation

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's an information problem. It's not an information 'TECHNOLOGY' problem. If you have the records written only on stone tablets, they can break. It doesn't matter if the data is stored in something anyone nowadays would consider technology. It's a simple information storage problem.

Yes, you could if you use a wildly broad brush say the chiseled rocks are a form of technology. That would then make EVERYONE EVERYWHERE an IT worker. Sorry, no. That's not the definition the world uses for IT.

First step, let Google scan the records

[djchristensen]

Regardless of what the end database looks like and how long it takes, the first step should be to hire Google to use their book scanning technology to scan all of those documents for preservation. Hell, I bet Google would do it for free. There goes the possibility that "We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled". If you don't like Google, I'm sure there are others who could do it just as well.

Re:First step, let Google scan the records

[Motard]

I agree. But add Google Maps as well (hell, you could probably just do it on Google Maps yourself).

But I think Google would be falling all over itself for the PR of doing something like this.

OK, I'll do it.

[confused one]

for $5 million, I'll rent temporary office space, hire people, pay them above industry standard with benefits. Then use these people to build the database, build the web interface, arrange for hosting (perhaps in the cloud), set up the server, enter all the data, have it independently verified. Within 1 year I can hand the keys of the completed project over to the government. Just let me know when you want me to start...

Re:OK, I'll do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They couldn't be bothered to put the right bodies in the right graves. What makes you think they'll put the right names into your database?

Re:OK, I'll do it.

[John Hasler]

> for $5 million...

You'll have just about enough money to hire all the specialized lawyers and accountants you'll need to comply with Federal procurement regulations.

Re:OK, I'll do it.

[confused one]

Not the case. I've done smaller government contracts before.

Re:How hard is it really to setup a MySQL database

[bugs2squash]

Exactly.
I'd start by firing anyone that knew this was a problem and did nothing to at least set up a temporary system and start inputting data. And in the mean time, get down to kinkos and photocopy the damn paper records.

Re:How hard is it really to setup a MySQL database

[Anonymous Coward]

You could crowd-source it to genealogists buffs, or ancestry.com with an expectation of reasonable accuracy.

one starbucks coffee spill away...

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha, you guys are so wrong. with ELECTRONICS, you are one coffee spill away from losing it. With paper, you wont lose it. fire? come on guys, paper doesn't get lost, period. not even hundreds of years later. by the "fire, flood" argument, we should not have copious data from hundreds of years ago, all on paper. compare with edison's (or whoever's) phonographs. bitches.

Re:one starbucks coffee spill away...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be shot

Re:one starbucks coffee spill away...

[mdm42]

Since it is only Starbcuks coffee that remains a problem, then, I would have thought the solution simple: Ban employees from buying their coffee at Starbucks. If its Starbucks coffee spills that are likely to wipe the records out, Just Say No! Install a Nestle coffee machine and all will be well...

Re:one starbucks coffee spill away...

[Anonymous Coward]

that reply proves I'm right, you inadequate nerd

Re:How hard is it really to setup a MySQL database

[TooMuchToDo]

Or, even better, have the Gov dept. procard (Government version of an expense account/credit card) Amazon EC2 and S3. Total cost? No more than a couple hundred dollars a month.

Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget consultants, lots and lots of consultants. Then you need contract project mangers to "manage" them. Then, of course, you need a PMO to manage the managers - but what process should they use? Thats where the $300/hr process engineer comes in, except he can't begin working until a Business Analyst consultant has created a model of the existing workflows. Of course this has now grown into several projects that now costitute a program - which needs its own manager.

Just let Google take their trike through there

[Animats]

Just let Google take their StreetView trike, the one for paths too small for a car, down every row in Arlington Cemetery. Then the whole thing would be in StreetView.

Sounds like typical government IT

[Dr_Barnowl]

I bet the contractors all bid in good faith, expecting it to be a cake walk like all of us are assuming right now, until they discovered a seething morass of requirements. Things like

1. They already had a technical specification for the system (dreamed up by the chief sexton or whatever a cemetery has) which was basically insane and unimplementable but expected it to be followed.
2. They change the requirements constantly.
3. The contractors discovered whole other sets of problems concealed in the back of the cupboard ("Oh yeah, we have to keep the form P12 in the cupboard...")
4. And things too terrible to imagine beyond the ken of engineers.

Re:Sounds like typical government IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the contractors all bid in good faith, expecting it to be a cake walk like all of us are assuming right now...

You've never done any government contracting, have you? Because that's not how the game is played.

1. Hire someone who used to work at the agency, or (alternatively) buy the congressman in your district.

2. Submit a ridiculously low bid that meets the letter of the specifications. Agency has to accept the lowest bid.

3. Start design, point out errors in the specification that makes it unusable.

4. Submit estimates for new requirements.

5. Profit

Re:Sounds like typical government IT

[perlith]

I recently visited Dallas Ft. Worth national cemetery . They had a computerized system in place in the visitors lobby. I know it allowed name / grave lookup. Not sure what else it provided. Am I missing something where Arlington can't scale up something similar that's already in place / use?

Overkill?

[bussdriver]

Ever hear of technology overkill?
Make 2 maps keep one somewhere else. Have somebody make a copy of the map - or even make a HAND copied map! Whoa! mind blowing concept! wait... what if you don't know how to draw or write because you typed everything from birth?

What is the temp outside? oh, I'll just press F12 and see what it is at the local airport over the internet OR I could just look out the window to a cleverly placed thermometer...

Rube-goldberg machine: web browser powered widget communicating over a TCP stack over the internet routing to dozens of machines to some database server which is updated by another computer running at the airport with all the same complexity plus has electronics to convert temperature to serial and then to USB... and each layer involves protocols and APIs... sure it works pretty well, but that is a lot of points of failure to read the temp which could differ a bit from my location. Who cares if they have slightly different weather than my house?? Well, if that doesn't matter that much then why am I using such a precise complex network of technology to get ball-park information when I could just stick my head out the door??

$5,000 could provide a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a text file checked into SVN as the database. It's only a few hundred thousand lines. You can just grep or filter for the correct result.

one starbucks coffee?

[Anarchduke]

Yes, I think we all remember the two mile island incident, a cup of java could be catastrophic under the right circumstances.

and they want to run healthcare...

[gchesney0001]

The government cannot do ANYTHING efficiently, except for the minimalist things it was meant to do, eg, protect our borders (hah!), and other basics defined in the constitution. GET RID OF PROFESSIONAL POLITICIANS! That means ALL of them.

Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing

[forkazoo]

This seems like a really interesting comment. I'm going to schedule a project kickoff meeting for next week where we can discuss some strategies for reading your comment as efficiently as possible. Reading your comment is a very high strategic priority for me, so I'll try to get a hardware provisioning meeting scheduled ASAP after the kickoff meeting so that I can let everybody know that I'm eventually going to request some hardware to use for reading your comment.

I setting a rough goal of having your comment read before the end of the fiscal year, but there is a good chance that the project will be pushed back a bit somewhere into the next few FY's.

morons

[bsercombe72]

1 fire, flood or spilled starbucks? Haven't these idiots heard of a PHOTOCOPIER yet???? Oh, you'll also need some offsite storage for your duplicate but you'd need that for your database anyways. Besides, the paper copy will be "readable" for far longer than a digital one under ideal conditions.

Re: Root!

[TaoPhoenix]

It looks like someone wants to update your cemetary record. Cancel or Allow?

Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

meetings and Donuts ...lots and lots of Donuts

I worked for the National Cemetery Administration

[HighOrbit]

I used to work for the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) at Veterans Affairs (VA). NCA uses two automated systems: Burial Operations Support System (BOSS) and Automated Monunment Application System (AMAS). They even have an on-line grave locator at http://www.cem.va.gov/ . These systems work very well. The systems are fully linked into the the VA administration of burial benefits due to deceased veterans or deceased military. The system contains information on current burials and has also been loaded with historical data all they way back to the civil war. Arlington already uses AMAS to order headstones. I'm sure the VA would be happy to add Arlington as a site for BOSS (they already manage 128 cemeteries and Arlington would just add one more). It would take some work to load the data, but that would be a one-time effort.

The interesting thing about the well-functioning VA systems is that they are NOT developed or administered by contractors. They were developed and are maintained by Government employees (civil servants). They are administered daily by civil servants. The programers are all GS employees and the DBAs are all GS employees. Contractors have never touched the systems and hopefully never will. The only thing that contractors did was provide some unskilled labor to do document scanning that was then imported into the system by the Government developers/admins.

VA has had success when they do in-house development with Government employees and dismal failures when they try to contract-out development. Just Google "CoreFLS" to see how a contractor developed system can fail to the tune of $250 Million and then never be deployed. CoreFLS was a $250 Million boondogle worked on by a bunch of H-1Bs that was so bad the Assistant Secretary for IM was fired by the President. If the President of the United States has to be personally notified that you fscked up, its as bad as it gets.

And other Record-Preserving Methods

[janerules]

As Ancestry ( .com and .ca) are using in the World Archives Project, the volunteer / check / review system is saving many other paper copy records, why can't taht work for the government too? And Ancestry isn't even paying for it! Only servers, I suppose. And an Annual Membership is like $300!!! There are MANY options out there.

U.S. Social Security Administration

[BBCWatcher]

Social Security has been maintaining records electronically for many decades, primarily using IBM mainframes (now a very few System z machines). Before that, SSA used IBM electromechanical tabulating equipment. Social Security can tell you today how much you earned, to the penny, decades ago. It has to: that's how certain benefits get calculated.
IT really isn't Arlington National Cemetery's core competency, nor should it be. That's often the problem with both public and private sectors: a relatively small organization struggles to implement a solution that dozens of other, larger departments have more or less solved already. I humbly suggest that Congress ought to consolidate IT projects so that a few good agencies can help other agencies. If 100 or more different agencies have to solve their own IT problems on their own, that really would be a waste of money and would achieve sub-optimal (or no) results. Social Security already carefully records all the death-related details of every American. There's even a searchable "death index." SSA just might be able to help Arlington if Congress could set up the organizational structures to foster better inter-agency cooperation.

Poor Bobby, who'd have thought it'd end like that

[Dogtanian]

Okay time for your morning pushups

Dude, if Corporal Tables is in the Arlington National Cemetery's database, he's not going to be doing many pushups!

(Then again, if he's removed via SQL injection, does he come back to life? Does the US Army have any policies on zombies serving within its ranks? I suspect that a "don't ask, don't tell" policy would fail on the basis that decomposing flesh and a propensity for eating your colleagues would be a dead giveaway).

Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing

[ajlisows]

Not so fast. People like you always want to just get right into it. Please submit a proposal detailing why the comment is a very high strategic priority and what reading it will mean to the group as a whole.

Next, we would have to determine if you are the one suited to reading the comment. I mean, we have people that are suited to this specific task. I know you are eager but you have a tendency to step on the feet of others.

Since you are obviously not a team player, a meeting will have to be called to determine how to handle your handling of this situation. If it is decided that you will get off with a verbal warning it won't take longer than a week. If we have to issue a written warning, there will be a meeting to elect a committee to write up the warning and another meeting to review what has been written.

All this seems like a lot of work. I'm going to call in the consultants.

Re:Similar Story: I agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, the press's take on this story is the problem is the lack of having the records in a computer.

The actual reported problems are that the records do not correctly show who is buried where or which plots are in use all of the time. The records are mostly correct, but not 100%.

Another reported issue is the idea that the records are being stored in a single place. I kinda doubt this as the records have been filmed on microfiche and making two copies is a fairly standard practice.

Speaking as a computer analyst with 30 plus years experience, computers are not the automatic answer to every problem. Computers do not fix data issues, nor do they automatically create an offsite backup procedure.