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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.'"
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.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!
Arlington National Cemetery is not an organization that can afford to take the risk of having their servers turned into zombies lightly...
Anonymous Coward? You'll never pass the background check!
This is for a government project.
I'll do it for twice that amount!!
Bet I get it before you do.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Glad to hear the DOD is just as bad as the DOE. On the other hand, OMG so much waste =(
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.
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.
> ...all they need is a MySQL database!
Wrong. PostgreSQL.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.