Federal IT Will Survive the Budget Deal

jfruhlinger writes "Like most people in America — and like most government workers in particular — federal IT staffers are wondering how the recent budget deal will affect them. It seems they won't suffer much, for two reasons: there was already a major tech consolidation effort underway, and everyone involved is hoping IT initiatives will result in cost-savings in other areas of government operations. In particular, federal moves to the cloud — which can yield considerable savings, despite a need for up-front investment that deters some shops — will continue."

Comments

Re:I;ll clue you in:

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

I'll share evidence explained directly to me by the person who was involved.

A friend of mine in the Navy was sent to shore duty to work with shipyard employees. This is a fairly common duty for people in the program I worked in.

The small division he was working for was all civilians and tasked with rebuilding and repairing complex mechanical equipment on ships and subs. His group was tasked with the replacement of a large valve on a critical ship's system. He took the usual squid work mentality and worked long hours to complete the job in less than 3 days, sleeping on the ship one of the days to get the work done. When he reported to his supervisor that the work was complete, the supervisor was livid.

The supervisor explained to my friend that this valve replacement was expected to take 5 people 3 weeks to complete, with the final week being 12 hour days with overtime pay. This supervisor was so angry that he told my friend never to work on another project for this division again. So my friend stopped going into work altogether. Since he was not assigned to a military base, nobody kept track of what he did or where he was. For the next two years he spent all of his time SCUBA diving and hang-gliding while making a nice salary and receiving full benefits.

I have yet to see in a corporate world not only with this amount of waste (500 man-hours billed to do 45 man-hours labor) as standard policy, but also someone making a nice salary that nobody tracks any of their productivity or even knows where the employee is.