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Tech CEOs Tell US Gov't How To Cut Deficit By $1 Trillion
alphadogg writes "The US government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by consolidating its IT infrastructure, reducing its energy use and moving to more Web-based citizen services, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday. The Technology CEO Council's report, delivered to President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the US government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities. 'America's growing national debt is undermining our global competitiveness,' said the council, chaired by IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano. 'How we choose to confront and address this challenge will determine our future environment for growth and innovation.' If the cash-strapped US government enacted all the recommendations in the advocacy group's report, it could save between $920 billion and $1.2 trillion by 2020, the group said. The federal government could also reduce IT energy consumption by 25 percent, and it could save $200 billion over 10 years by using advanced analytics to stop improper payments, the report said."
Should we be suspicious when the IBM CEO thinks the U.S. needs a massive IT overhaul? I guess you could say he is qualified to know whether it can be done or not, but it would no doubt steer a lot of money to large IT corporations, such as IBM, that are large enough to handle such a large undertaking.
I'll bite on this one because I'm actually a Project Manager for Northrop Grumman Information Services. My views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my company, yadda, yadda, blah, blah.
First, you need to know (or remember) that huge corporations (be they defense contractor, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, whomever) are often a conglomeration of previously small companies. The company I've worked for has changed names four times as it was bought up repeatedly (twice in a three-month span one year) and is only most recently called "Northrop Grumman" but, for the most part, I still work with and for the same small group of people I hired on with nearly a decade ago. Yes, corporations add capabilities when they see opportunity. Who wouldn't?
Second, depending upon the work you do, adding all of the additional infrastructure required to meet the various regulatory requirements of a government contract is non-trivial - security clearances alone, if required, can be a nightmare. The company never says "Hey, I want to add more costs to my bottom-line and reduce my profits". Those bureaucratic requirements are driven by the government, not the contractor.
Third, often times the contracts awarded by the government require or strongly encourage the Bigs (like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) to hire "Smalls" - smaller, perhaps more specialized corporations, that would not otherwise be able to get involved in these contracts. "Disadvantaged" small businesses, those run by minorities or other protected classes, are also highly sought after by the Bigs in order to meet various participatory quotas, etc. This type of thing allows the Big to address the regulatory and management issues while funneling funds to Smalls who might do much of the work. You learn after awhile, at least at Northrop Grumman, that you are an integrator first and a developer second - if you can reuse something someone else has built that is *much* better than building it yourself (you know, that whole "reuse" idea that we've all been chasing after for the past 50 years).
All of that aside, a huge amount of costs are associated with government bureaucracy. The profit margins on my contract, for example, are *limited* to 8.5%. No matter how much I spend, I'm only going to earn 8.5% - that profit margin is ridiculously tiny when you consider what a firm operating at commercial rates is going to make profits wise. "Oh...so you'll just drag it out so you make more money." Ha! Sure. The project drags out...but I can tell you from 15 years working with the US Government, it drags on and on not because I really want to keep working on the same stinkin' thing (redoing it over and over) for my own giggles and grins but because the US Government is a huge bureaucracy and it takes forever for them to make a decision on anything. Need clarification on a feature request? Well...first we have to work that through the Government Program Management Office (PMO) who oversees your project, then they need to potentially track down user-representatives, convene a meeting, possibly do a usability test and/or request a conference, get multiple disparate agencies who are going to use your tool to agree to put aside their differences and unique business processes, etc., etc., etc.
Meanwhile, the team is being held to an unrealistic schedule set for political reasons. To minimize risk of schedule slippage, you make a decision and press on accepting the fact that you may have to rework the feature you just developed. The government entities that are closest to you are just as frustrated as you are...and they know they can't let your team go onto other projects because then they lose the people who understand the project and its history - who have the requirements and design knowledge to meet the needs of the customer so they keep giving you money to keep your team together. You do your best to catch up on the copious amounts of documentation the government requires (for my 450K SLOC system