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Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws

Posted by Soulskill on from the may-bobby-tables-rest-in-peace dept.

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.'"

3 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Accountability by Pete+Venkman · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  2. Even the government can do better than this by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Sounds like typical government IT by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.