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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
Where's accountability when 5 million gets spent and nobody can even make something as simple as a SPREADSHEET?
They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!
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.
Arlington National Cemetery is not an organization that can afford to take the risk of having their servers turned into zombies lightly...
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...
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....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
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.
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.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
'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.)