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Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage
Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."
Hermes: What do we do when we break somebody's window?
Dwight: Pay for it?
Hermes: Heavens, no! We apologize! With nice, cheap words.
I am officially gone from
The "old business man discovering the internet" IT bubble culture is still alive and well in the defense industry. They have such a bad track record with networking technology it borders on scary. Transformation comes to mind quickly and they keep repeating the same mistakes.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
Meanwhile, the last week has marked the first time where there was really a valid excuse for apparently unmoving lines at Virginia DMV branches... glad I don't have to get my license renewed until 2017. They should be back up by then.
Probably but you die on the inside every day you have to work up bullshit excuse why this was bound to happen and why it's a good thing.
As much as Northrup is being bashed here, I don't think this problem is specific to NG, but common to many large contractors and their subs.
In the few times I've worked with subcontractors doing IT for the government I've been unimpressed. Even being one step away from the prime contract seems to allow for many problems, both technical and managerial. Requirements and deadlines aren't met, and they pull the BP-Halliburton-Transocean trick of avoiding responsibility by blaming each other (as well as everyone's favorite scapegoat: the government). Trying to get a subcontractor to build things they way they were supposed to will often require waiting for the next spiral, which means going way over budget.
I understand the difficulty with pushing too hard, punishing contractors who screw up and scaring them away from government work, but it seems we've gone too far in accepting very expensive third-rate work. As much as the public likes to say government can't do anything right, how much worse off would we be than $2.4B in the hole with nothing to show for it but a mediocre datacenter run by amateurs? I don't think I'm asking for much, I haven't touched on the very messy political poisoning of contracting.
Mod parent way up. I've seen it in other places too.
Often when you ask people in the accounting department, they'll say they don't really know what's going on because IT made the system. When you talk to IT, they'll say they don't know because the system was specified by Accounting. The truth is that some smart guys in each department got together and forged some sort of system together. Then the smart guys went on to bigger and better things, while the peons were left with some special voodoo system.
Now you want to move said voodoo system over to a consulting company. The assumption is that the Accountants know every detail of what the old system did. Well, they don't. But nobody is willing to step forward and say that. So the new consultants come along and gosh, nobody knows what the systems do.
Then people ponder why it "doesn't work." Sigh.
This is how shit happens.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Northrop Grumman was cobbled together over several years from about 1999-2006 from Northrop, Grumman, TRW and several other players. It is so dysfunctional because it is composed of so many competing units that don't operate like a single company. In fact, when I briefly worked for them out of college, most of my coworkers were from TRW and hated the idea of being NGC employees.