Slashdot Mirror
How Dumb Policies Scare Tech Giants Away From Federal Projects
An anonymous reader writes "A study published in March found that that the reason why the U.S. government has sub-par IT programs is because leading commercial IT companies established in the U.S. aren't involved in government contracting. Either the government holds closed bidding, essentially stifling competition to its own disadvantage, or prospective companies are put off by the cost-prohibitive regulations associated with government acquisition given the low returns (less than 10% as compared to 20% or more in the commercial world). The dysfunction that results has been documented by the Government Accountability Office: of 15 Department of Defense IT projects studied, 11 had cost increases (one of which was by 2,333%), 13 had schedule slippages (one of which was by six years), and only three met system performance goals. If the U.S. wants to lead other governments in technical capabilities by tapping into the technology being developed within its own borders, then some say that instead of exemptions and workarounds such as was applied with Healthcare.gov, a complete rebuild of the whole acquisition program would need to be implemented."
Juicy contracts go to people that donate. I remember seeing a study that showed that donating to Senators had something like a 50% return on investment. It's not surprising that all that's left after the cronies get a pick are bum contracts. The good contracts go to the Kochs of the world.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In house can lead to cost saving from both less overhead and from being able to consolidate stuff as well having more buying power as one big unit.
also you can more to getter better people as you are not paying all of the contacting overhead.
I'm no academic scholar, but this lobbiest-turned-congressmen-turned-lobbiest revolving door is inherent in our system from the beginning. It's one thing to take outright bribes while in office - that's plain corruption. What's happening here is just delayed-payment, or a promise of future riches through a paycheck.
It might take a Constitutional Amendment to ban this practice...and there's fat chance of that happening with the foxes guarding the henhouse.
There must be a theorem like Godel's that says that any interestingly complex set of rules is gameable.
There are a lot of studies showing that the contracting procedures of NYC and other larger political entities result in fewer, larger, more politically-connected contractors, and that is the result of several rounds of voters getting fed up with the corruption, voting in 'reformers' and giving them the power to correct the corruption, rinse and repeat.
By this time in history, we surely understand that more rules does not produce more honesty, more justice? But we keep on making more law, more rules, the inertia of the Status Quo.
There's also the lovely open-ended cost plus contracts that force everyone to dramatically underbid in order to win them. The lucky winner gets to write their own checks and rob the government blind.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
First, there's all the rules that make sure rules first go to minority- or female-owned companies, or to companies in at risk zones.
Next there's all the regulation.
Next there's government slowness. It's not market responsive.
The result is that people who are interested in running a business go away, UNLESS their business model is making money off government by charging it extra for all of its special demands.
It's no wonder the DC area is growing faster than anywhere else and salaries are higher there.
Futurist Traditionalism
I think maybe the U.S. government has sub-par IT programs because the U.S. government is sub par at doing just about everything.
What? And destroy the current lucrative system of kickbacks, cronyism, and propping up otherwise unprofitable, unaffordable, unworkable systems and businesses? How will Senators and members ever get elected properly without the subtle system of bribes that currently grease the wheels of professional politics? Don't you know *anything* about how to get stuff done inside the Beltway?
Sheesh...you people need to get a grip and understand how power works in this country.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's true, but there's also the question of why those "juicy contracts" exist. A juicy contract is one with high profits - one in which the government pays you much more than it costs you to acquire the item you're selling to re government.
Government routinely pays a lot more than what they could purchase the same item for at Walmart. I've seen it with my own eyes. A government agency can only buy from a vendor approved for the project, after 400 pages of paperwork to get approved. The vendor charges $150 for a widget. Walmart charges $30 for the same widget. The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150. To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
The pproblem, of course, is that if they can skip the BS and just get the item from Walmart, they can also skip the BS and just buy from clintobama.com
who's gonna build the new bidding website for the new program?!
What a fatalistic, futile place to work it seems. Never been there, but it seems every ideal they might stand for is quixotic in reality.
of 3 planes (1 camera/control).... something that should be priced maximum as a regular family sedan if that....?
I've been an employee of one of these contract IT companies for a little over 2 years, and I can tell you that my contract is undoubtedly no different.
From my perspective as a software developer, it seems like the issues are all deliberate. There's been a pattern since I've worked here. Everytime a competent developer leaves, they're replaced by someone who can't develop software. Sometimes it's the chief's friend, or some government employee's wife, or whatever. But no fewer than 3 positions on my team have been taken up by people who have no computer science education, no interest in software development, and no inclination to learn.
Last person that was hired, someone came over to tell me 4 minutes before his interview. I printed off a ludicrously simple programming problem and handed it to him, asked him if he'd have the guy "solve" it. The manager interviewing let the candidate hesitate on the problem for 4 seconds before pulling it from him, and saying "don't worry about it, I want to keep this interview short.". So my team is down another programmer and + another welfare recipient.
The only reason I've stayed her so long is that the work is occasionally incredibly interesting, but recently my boss decided to pull me so I could do something to "help the team" it involves clicking links and typing into a spreadsheet for 8 hours a day.
A few months a government employee decided they needed the area that my team's revision control server occupied as their office. My server was decomissioned, the area was converted to an office, and the government employee transferred to another location less than a month later.
I complain every few months, but the only thing complaining seems to do is make everyone suspicious of me. I need to get out of here.
To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
If we could guarantee that the widgets they buy from Walmart are made to acceptable standards and with verifiable provenance when necessary, I'd say sure.
But even though a 30 cent bolt from Walmart looks like a $5 bolt from McDonnell Douglas, the latter has been certified as to material and strength. There is an issue with counterfeit aircraft parts, and aircraft do break when the wrong parts are installed. You wouldn't trust Walmart to provide your aircraft parts, I hope, so buying them there would be a mistake.
Audits and certifications and travel restrictions and the inability to go out to lunch with a government employee because it might be a "gift" etc etc etc.
If we could guarantee that the widgets they buy from Walmart are made to acceptable standards and with verifiable provenance when necessary, I'd say sure.
In all likelihood, except for a very limited number of military-grade equipment (and sometmes even then) the widgets are probably made on the same assembly line in China.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I get the feeling that it's nothing to do with being a Government agency. I've seen more than 50% failure rate on very large IT projects for other regular businesses and corporations.
There seems to be a major problem with sotware projects producing an accurate requirements spec, and following that though to implementation. End users have no idea what they want, fill the requirements full of edge cases, and keep moving the goalposts. Programmers often have no idea how the software will be used so whenever there are gaps they improvise with the most ridiculous schemes. And software architects always say "technology XXXX will save us, it makes YYY so easy", forgetting entirely that you still have to produce a sensible user interface with a sane workflow and that takes 80% of the effort.
Personally I cant see this getting better for a while. It's not the fault of any one person, it's just human nature when trying to deal with highly complex systems. We need to use a radically different design approach and employ exceptionally good project managers, and even then we might still want to cross our fingers.
There are companies whose sole purpose is getting government contracts. They know how to write the bid and which useless-but-nice-resume people to subcontract. After they get the contract, the subcontractors subcontract to the cheapest shop in india. The people on the bid with the phds write a few emails, collect their checks, and move on. These are usually the same people sitting on a board for some other government project, show up for meetings once a month, and get paid well into 6 figures.
Surprised to learn of the low return on gov contracts. From what I heard, private sector usually lowballs initial contracts to be the lowest bidder but charges through the nose for any changes to requirements which are inevitable in large/complex IT projects.
In all likelihood, except for a very limited number of military-grade equipment (and sometmes even then) the widgets are probably made on the same assembly line in China.
I used aircraft parts as an example, and the likelyhood that the correct parts are made on the same assembly lines in China as the 30 cent Walmart versions is vanishingly small.
I don't remember this sort of incisive analysis going on with regards to healthcare or tax law.
In all likelihood, except for a very limited number of military-grade equipment (and sometmes even then) the widgets are probably made on the same assembly line in China.
Apparently, you have no familiarity with Federal Acquisition Regulations, and just like to make stuff up that will make all the equally uninformed folks here nod their heads wisely.
...never experience cost increases, schedule slippages, or fail to meet performance goals?
Big data projects fail all the time. They just don't get as much publicity when they are private.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
And when the government's mismanagement of the contract leads a successful contract into ruin, guess who gets the blame? The contractor because the public doesn't get the benefit of seeing how the sausage was made. They'll never see how a contract that may have been a pretty good product got tuned into a clusterfuck because someone changed priorities and an architecture that was mean for one set of requirements "for some strange reason" couldn't neatly be refactored to a different set of requirements.
Commercial software and 'cutting edge' tech companies work fast and loose. We just need to make shit work, not necessarily adhere to page after page of specifications. That is the polar opposite of government work. There's no way in hell I'd want my company to take me away from the high-return world of hack programming and force me to read pages of documentation and requirements for each line of code I write.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The head of a major company, that has interests in both defense and private contracts, described it quite simply (paraphrasing):
You get larger profit margins in the commercial space, but it's uneven and uncertain. The defense contracts offer long-term stable and predictable profits.
Of course the defense contracts require a bit of revolving-door politics... Hiring former government employees who know all the exhaustive rules and regulations, and can write a contract proposal in such a way that it will get accepted... and a whole team of people similarly focused on the government relationship, and compliance with rules and regulations.
In the end, on balance the two come out roughly even. But, of course a company that doesn't do any government contracts, can't hope to start getting some without a big investment in a team that get you off the ground.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Government routinely pays a lot more than what they could purchase the same item for at Walmart. I've seen it with my own eyes. A government agency can only buy from a vendor approved for the project, after 400 pages of paperwork to get approved. The vendor charges $150 for a widget. Walmart charges $30 for the same widget. The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150. To avoid HAVING a juicy contract at all, government agencies should be able to just use Walmart.com.
The paperwork just to get on the bidders list can be enormous. So much so, that our company just told any government bidders to go through on of our resellers, because we were not going to jump through all those hoops. Suddenly, a short track paper work trail was available. Still not interested. (We had been down that way before, and wasn't really any shorter.) We got the sales anyway, just had to give our resellers their cut, which was less costly than the paperwork.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells. They might be buying a light bulb, but they want one that's ALWAYS going to be EXACTLY the same, and certified as such. They don't want one that's going to be silently changed to a different design... That would cause maintenance nightmares, and/or could get people killed.
I've seen the financial reports from a few defense contractors, and I've never seen the huge profit margins you are suggesting. Where are they? Why isn't Lockheed-Martin more profitable than Google, Exxon-Mobile, etc?
The added expense may come from the testing and milspec certification of every individual item... Or from being required to stockpile and warehouse the item for 50 years to ensure they can continue to supply the exact item to the government. Or it may just be confusion on the part of the ignorant public, thinking that all "toilet seats" are created equal, and the expensive aluminum one used on aircraft could be substituted for a $30 walmart one, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The article suggests there's a lot of room for improvement, but the first problem is that our Congress can't be bothered to do the (admittedly) hard, tedious work of improving it. Seems like all they care about lately is grand-standing to attract more money to buy more TV ads to get re-elected... to do the same thing over again.
Howabout we actually show up to the polls in decent numbers this year and vote them all out. It don't matter who they are or who the opponent is, even if it's a chimpanzee, we all pull the other switch and send the incumbent home to do whatever he's gonna do. Let the star-chamber campaign gods of both parties scratch their heads why the pricey attack ads didn't work. Then do it again two years later, and again after that, until we get a Congress that actually takes the people's business seriously (the "people", you know, being all of us).
Yeah, I know. But don't they say something about democracies getting exactly the government they deserve?
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Government IT is not proactive, they are purely reactive. The people in the trenches tend to be treated like dummies.
- Endless security holes in an OS? Don't change OSs, wait for $SECURITY_FIRM to release an update to their shoddy product.
- Some network gear is cheaper and just as good (or better) than Cisco? Oh we can't: too much money invested in CCNA-type ass-wipe paper.
- "Great idea, Bob. We're going to pass it by some contractors for the once-over."
- "A lot of these external-facing Linux boxes would be safer running OpenBSD." "Oh, but our guys only know Linux."
LOL if you wanna see shit piled on shit, you only have to see the giant cluster-fuck that is Shared Services Canada (SSC) : the GoC's attempt at consolidating 43 government departments' IT into one. Some groups have complete deadlock. Some people have TO THIS DAY not been communicated with by their manager after a good year and a half in.
Yet the status emails we get from senior management make it sound like everything is ~just fine~.
Hiring is a joke, they don't want the BEST people for the job, they only want people who are bilingual. So a drooling inbred wearing a hockey helmet from Kee-Beck can get a good job without any skills.
Disclosure: I am BBB, meaning I get by well enough in either language, but giving bilingual a higher value over technical skills? In an IT environment? No wonder moral sucks the big one.
So I sit there in my little CS-03 cube and mutter "4 more years and out... 4 more years and out..."
Or perhaps he actually has some experience with aircraft. Counterfeit bolts are a HUGE issue as is quite a few other things that are supposed to be specced properly and are built in China. Everything from bolts to beams for bridges have had problems - ask San Fran about the latter. It takes all of 5 seconds to find PLENTY of evidence that counterfeit bolts are a problem in multiple industries. Counterfeit electronics are also an issue and for the military this is 100% unacceptable unless you would like to find yourself in a jet fighter coming apart because of it. If you think that it all comes off of the same assembly line you've got a screw loose yourself...
http://www.choice-distribution...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
www.asminternational.org/pdf/Aug8-12.pdf
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
10% is about the max most companies make although they may very well hide money in the overhead. Auditors look for any issues and are quick to fine and take back funds if they find a problem.
it's the closest we can get to socialism in this country. Bascially, America has a huge amount of idle economic capacity. The wealthy can't even begin to tap it, but they have so much of the wealth that left to their own the entire economy would grind to a halt. So we tax and spend because it's the only way to get things moving. It's that or the Dark Ages and 1000 years of nothing...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Seriously, before Clinton and W gutting federal gov. hiring, they had top notch ppl, AND they were mostly secured. Now, we have spies all over via the contractor programs. Worse, many of them are inept, or brought in from India or China, leading to a serious brain drain.
So, time to restore hiring of decent employees.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I could have sworn that the government recently built bridges & buildings with poorly made bolts...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/bay-bridge-quake-safety-bolts-fail-test-article-1.1300679
>the latter has been certified as to material and strength
There goes that theory. I'm sure you can find articles about helicopters and other aircraft having problems due to bad bolts if you google a bit.
Government can't hide its mistakes as well as industry can. How many SAP implementations have delivered on time and on budget? How many other projects have cost companies millions more than planned?
Yes, government IT is bad, but its not unique in that...
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
A friend of mine had hands on experience with a contract that was "done right." It was a standing offer arrangement to purchase computers within the government. Competitive bids, open competition, it all sounds A-OK, right?
It wasn't. My friend had to use some of those computers from the winning bidder. They were garbage. Something like 50% of them failed out of the box. Over the course of a year the failure rate approached 100%. The amount of wasted time and effort, and the costs of trying to get those computers serviced easily ate up the contract savings and more besides. The vendor proved as incompetent at repairing the systems as they were at initial assembly. Some of the computers literally never worked and were never repaired adequately.
And understand, the winning bidder was the low-cost bidder, just like the rules stipulated. No department was allowed to deviate from the standing offer, not even in the face of demonstrable vendor failure to provide a usable product.
Certainly you can say, the bid process should allow or even mandate that factors other than price determine a winning bid. However I'd bet a considerable sum of money that in this situation, those other factors were considered. And the winning vendor looked good enough to win based on that.
YMMV. I wouldn't ever say that every competitive bid is destined to fail, only that the process contain some safety mechanisms. Something to deal with unsatisfactory vendor performance.
The same 3D printer you mean. Only a brungus or a hunk would deny that 3D printing is how everything is built these days.
I used aircraft parts as an example, and the likelyhood that the correct parts are made on the same assembly lines in China as the 30 cent Walmart versions is vanishingly small.
Actually the chances of them being made on the same assembly line is pretty high. The difference of course is that the line that has to "have" the certification, they'll use a higher grade material and take random samples for stress testing to ensure that it's right. They may even go as far as x-raying the materials before it goes through processing, and after to look for material defects.
I used to work in heavy industry back oh 15 years ago now. The stuff we sold went to the US military, and was used for scraping your ICBM's(particularly the minutemans). Everything had to be checked like that before it went out, but the differences were trivial in terms of what we sold to the general public and what went to the military.
Om, nomnomnom...
It's like that everywhere except small business. Scott Adams was only half joking when he made that Dilbert strip about nobody remembering the outcome of the projects you've been on...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Government contracts are usually DESIGNED for corruption. Have you ever actually READ a government RFQ (Request for Quote) or RFP (Request for proposal) for any technical thing? I have - MANY times. They are generally well-tailored so that only the vendor the government wants will have a product or service that exactly matches the "requirements" (and often only the exact item the government wants to buy will meet the "requirements"). This is one of the most important ways that crony-capitalism works.
1. Airplane builder shows politician its airplanes (and reminds him many of his votors depend on those jobs).
2. Congress tells company, its investors, and employees that they NEED him in office to assure thir "fair access" to government contracts, etc.
3. Congressman gets campaign contributions.
4. Pentagon needs new planes.
5. Congressman uses power to let pentagon know how great planes that "just happen to be from his district" are.
6. Pentagon understands it may not get money from congress to buy any other planes but law requires a bidding process, so it crafts RFPs and RFQs to precisely fit planes from congressman's district.
7. Competitors browse RFQs and RFPs and quickly see no potential because it would cost too much to make their plane match precise requirements (which are probably not tied to actual mission requirements that their planes would be perfectly capable of meeting or exceeding) so competitors either do not bid or only bid as a way to keep a toe-in-the-water.
8. Pentagon, via "completely open" process, buys exactly the product the vendor in the congressman's district wanted it to buy, and the public is none-the-wiser.
Big Government and Big Business at play.... lubricated with corruption, and spread through every department, agency, etc. so broadly that the public cannot keep enough eyes on all of it. It's completely normal and unstoppable as long as government is big and involved in everything. If you could scale the federal government WAY down to just what it was supposed to do, then the corruption opportunities (which would STILL exist) would would be far fewer and therefore more-easily monitored. Oh, and it's absolutely NOT just in the pentagon (as in my example), the Obama administration injected outreach groups into the Obamacare system in such a way that many of their activist groups, like the former ACORN and SEIU, got the business (and access to federal money). Nothing new here at all.
Don't get pulled in by the initial distortion. It has nothing to do with buying a particular widget. It is all down to 'VERY LARGE' tenders and contracts. Specifically tenders written in such a way as to exclude the majority of smaller suppliers and targeted at a particular cartel of very large suppliers, this all done purposefully. The cartels pretty much write the tenders they 'er' bid on, it reality just ration them out amongst themselves.
This all happened when lobbyists fought hard to shrink government ie smaller purchasing and managing units of government were no longer able to manage a complex multifaceted supply chain made up of internal labour and many smaller contracts and were forced to hand out major contracts. These of course come under the purview of lawyers with extraordinarily complex contracts, which the shrunken government departments are not able to audit due to lack of personal. This is top down corruption, facilitated by corrupt corporations, funding corrupt lobbyists who seek to ensure corrupt politicians get elected who in turn insert corrupt political appointees into what is left of government departments. So a straight up conspiracy from the get go by corporations to defraud the treasury, with the rally cry of shrinking government, whilst the reality was, make government agencies incapable of properly managing anything so making easy to steal millions and billions from the public and screw the consequences.
Reality was and is, things go a whole lot smoother when government does as much work for itself in house as possible and avoids contracting out anything as those contracts feed corruption. The bigger the contracts the greater the corruption and one need look no further than the glaring example of Darth Cheney and Halliburton, billions stolen and hundreds of thousands dead so that 'NO BID' contracts could be handed out with massive profits (not that it was the only element of a particularly corrupt war).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Another big part of the problem is the lack of accountability.
More likely it's too much accountability, everything being defined in water-fall style specifications, which can't possibly be implemented.
Less accountability, trust and iterative development have been identified to provide higher project success rates...
the responsible government employee would lose his job (and pension)
WTF? Pension is money saved up. Why should anybody ever loose that. In any line of work, that's just messed up.
There is talk of criminal neglect, do a criminal case...
But this kind of "accountability", which is more about assigning blame to someone and ruining their career, is exactly why nobody wants to do government contracts.
and the contractors would finish the job on their own dime, things would change
Yes, contractor would factor in the risk of failure, or risk of going over price and raise his prices by a factor of 10.
Or just use a shell company and let that go bankrupts if he fails to deliver the contract. Bottom line: software development is high risk, from a study of 4500 projects over $15M, 45% of it projects goes above budget and 17% threatens the existence of the company.
See: http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...
The inflexibility of contract and specification governed software development is at the heart of the problem here. More accountability isn't going to fix that. More punishment will only cause officials and contractors to do more work to cover their own ass... Instead of taking an actual risk, which is what software project management is all about, it's about managing risk and uncertainty.
"Small government" advocates are frequently shysters who don't want anyone to catch them with their fingers in the till - or the useful idiots of such shysters. Having enough people to ensure that foxes don't get allowed into henhouses unaccompanied does not necessarily mean "big government".
Is that point put simply enough or should I try again?
I used to work in heavy industry back oh 15 years ago now. The stuff we sold went to the US military, and was used for scraping your ICBM's(particularly the minutemans). Everything had to be checked like that before it went out, but the differences were trivial in terms of what we sold to the general public and what went to the military.
Wait wait wait..... You sold parts needed to scrap nuclear missiles to the general public?
Hmm... seems that everyone needs to have some high-adrenaline hobby nowadays....
bickerdyke
Wait wait wait..... You sold parts needed to scrap nuclear missiles to the general public?
Hmm... seems that everyone needs to have some high-adrenaline hobby nowadays....
Sure. Don't you know that the stuff to scrap nuclear missiles is used in the manufacturing sector quite often, any machine shop or mill will be using the same tools. There isn't anything earth shattering regarding this. The difference is, certification.
Om, nomnomnom...
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells.
The problem is, sometimes they do. There are some situations where you need something with exactly known parts and quality that can be replaced with an identical one in ten years (guaranteed by the vendor) if required. There are some situations where you need something that works now and if you have to throw it away in 3 years, that's fine because your next upgrade cycle is in two years anyway. The government doesn't differentiate these in the procurement rules, so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts, at an increase in price that's more than just buying two or three identical machines from another vendor (or even from Dell's consumer lines) and throwing them away when they break.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They have you. You must apply to leave your job. forms filled out by hand in triplicate. Then they will be sent to data processing for manual data entry into a form originally written for Lotus Notes. This form is rediculously out of date so your reason for leaving "better opportunity elsewhere" becomes "disgruntled employee".Just so happens that all reasons for leaving are strangely changed into this single available checkbox on the form.
4 Months after applying to leave, which in the mean time you are required to show up to work, else be charged with fraud for receiving government paychecks if you don't, they return the form to you for having a signature not matching the one on file. The signature on file being your old signature you used to use when you were in gradeschool since the picked it off your permanent record.
Eventually this drives you completely crazy are you're checked into a government hospital.
Not to mention that the $5 bolt will be made in America whereas the $0.30 bolt will be made in China. Buying the American bolt will prevent sending even more money overseas. And the $5 bolt is guaranteed not to have hidden microphones or intelligence-gathering equipment in it whereas the $0.30 bolt might be designed to fail when someone, who isn't the US government, wants it to.
People say "OMG! I can't believe that the government has 400 pages of regulations for something as simple as a bolt!" but if you actually read those regulations then they make a lot of sense. They cover the specifications to which the bolt will be designed, how the bolts will be delivered, how many will be delivered in what time frame, how many must be on hand, how quickly a rush order must be fulfilled, how they will be tested for quality, how they will be secured to prevent unauthorized personnel from accessing them (this doesn't really apply to bolts, but it does to a lot of sensitive computing and communications equipment), etc. This is stuff that couldn't matter less if you just need a box of bolts to build a tool shed in your back yard, but can make all the difference in the world when you're building a couple thousand fighter jets.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
The contracting system seems to work like this: Contracting company bids for a job, and gets the contract. They then spam job sites looking for someone who has the skills to do the job. The company takes its cut off the top of their lowball bid, and pays the software developer whatever is left. I see this as exploitative and would not work for this system. At least in the private sector, there's no middle man skimming money out of a developer's paycheck. The contracting system is designed to self-select people who can't get jobs any other way, so no wonder government IT projects are tragic. If they want better software, why not reform this exploitative setup and attract a better level of talent? The utter failure of the government health care site was no big surprise, it was just in the public eye.
Paying too much isn't paying too much. When "stupid government spending" is highlighted, the people are entertained by this as if it were some kind of joke. It's not. This is highlighting and obvious channel by which money is being moved. You're supposed to find out who the government is buying paperclips from, who made the decision and all that. You will find that giving the people's money out to these other people is the return on investment. So what's the investment? That's what we're supposed to be looking at.
I buy stuff like this for a living for the DoD. There's aspects that are included in the FAR and DFARS that we can't get around. First and foremost is the Trade Agreements Act, or TAA, as specified in the FAR 52.225-5. It means we don't buy from a vendor unless they can guarantee the product is made/substantially transformed in a country that falls into 1 of 4 categories: World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement Countries (think NAFTA, CAFTA), Least Developed Countries, or Caribbean Basin Countries. There's additional rules for DoD after that, including stuff along the lines of, "must be a friendly nation" unless there's nothing available that is similar in those countries. Also of particular 'fun' for contracting folks: data rights. If Contractor A develops software for the Navy to, say, run the on-ship electronics, they get to keep the data rights for 5 years! So, when Navy needs an upgrade to the software to add capability for a new type of missile in THREE years, there's only one source to go to. THEN, the data rights for that upgrade get a NEW 5 year clock.
When we try negotiating out the data rights to let Navy procure software upgrades or even a new system and provide Best Value, we get the DFARS clause thrown right back at us, and then the initial contract cost skyrockets. To make matters worse, let's say we waited 5 years, and then decided to create a new effort since the data rights have expired. Guess who still has to buy that data from the Contractor.
You wouldn't trust Walmart to provide your aircraft parts, I hope, so buying them there would be a mistake.
A lot of people trusted Walmart with their pets' internal organs. We saw what that got them.
Hell, a lot of people trust Walmart with their own internal organs.
1. Big waterfall software projects fail. I collect examples of project successes and failures, and I have never come across a large software project that was successfully delivered on-time and on-budget. It's like unicorns: People dream of them, but they don't really exist. The only way you even have a chance of delivering a big project is to break it into pieces and deliver a lot of small projects.
2. Government funding forces you to do waterfall projects. Funding for big projects must be approved, meaning that you have to get all the requirements and project planning defined up front. After that, even if you can work some iterations into the implementation, you are still basically doing a big waterfall project. See (1) above.
3. Politics (if you are more direct: corruption). Big government projects go through a horrible bidding process. The successful bidder must outsource parts of the project, and the outsourcing must be distributed to the right types of businesses (women/minority/whatever) in the right political districts. None of this has anything to do with getting a good project done. It's more like making your best developers write code while carrying sacks of cement on their backs and hopping on one foot.
4. Lastly, regulations. Back when I worked in government acquisition, we once has a small contract to let. One bidder was a company that had never done government work before, but they thought they'd give it a try. They underbid the competition by a factor of 3 or 4. My boss quietly took the CEO to the side and told him that he'd better double his bid, because he had no clue how much regulatory crap and how much paperwork was about to head his way. The company doubled their bid, got the contract, and I'm pretty sure they still lost money on the deal.
tl;dr - Who in their right mind wants to work on a project that is (2) doomed to failure from the start, (3) prohibits you from trying to do a good job and (4) is more about paperwork than anything else.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
What a bullshit copout. You and the retards like yuo are the problem that's allowed this. It's not corruption. It's cowards like you, en masse, going "oh, my vote doesn't matter" and then letting the nutjobs own the vote. Fuck off.
Dumb policies scare tech giants away from any projects, not just "federal" ones.
The problem lies with the problematic organization, in this case, the federal bodies and agencies of the government. However, we all know government doesn't attract the best and the brightest, it attracts those with the pursuits of low men.
If I had a solution for you I'd share it, but it's a complex problem. Perhaps we can get some scientific studies done on the make up and functioning of politician brains (even if we have to hide it within another study), and then work to adjust those behaviors into roles that benefit our species as a whole.
Given the willful and unpunished abuses against all of us by the NSA, et al... do we really want the national government in toto to be world-class in IT?
the differences were trivial in terms of what we sold to the general public and what went to the military.
Seems no different than in CPU manufacturing, where everything comes out the same, but the chips that came out closer to perfect get sold as a different model than the ones that have a core or two disabled.
I'm not sure if they are trying to poke fun at themselves, or if they are completely serious with that statement. Pretty much any time I hear corporate buzz-word speak like "synergy", I immediately tune out, and assume the speaker is hiding their ineptitude behind a veil of gobbledegook. I suppose they will also try to tell us that government acquisition needs to "optimize", "think outside the box", "close the loop", "strategize", be "pro-active, not reactive", and "ideate". I'll get right on that, soon as I finish the coversheet for the latest TPS report.
Experience can vary widely. Just yesterday I reviewed the purchase order for some small dollar cabling and parts we need for a small data center. I remarked at how much they were able to drive down the price of some items, almost 50% off retail on $150 parts.
I took some time to read the report and found the root cause is an issue of poor project management--It started with initial specifications issues, lack of proper controls and reporting, lack of effective time management, lack of effective corrective-action procedures, specification creep, poor or no use of risk management tools, improperly implemented testing programs... the list is endless....
In simple terms the folks charged with implementing these large projects failed to follow industry established best-practices---Sadly this, of late, seems typical of government projects....
The issue isn't cost-prohibitive regulations...It's simply a matter of poor project management.
> They might be buying a light bulb, but they want one that's ALWAYS going to be EXACTLY the same, and certified as such. They don't want one that's going to be silently changed to a different design... That would cause maintenance nightmares, and/or could get people killed.
> The vendor buys the item for $30 and sells it to the government for $150. ...
> The added expense may come from the testing and milspec certification of every individual item... Or from being required to stockpile and warehouse the item for 50 years to ensure they can continue to supply the exact item to the government.
Yep, all for a dang lightbulb for some bureaucrat's office. Guess what - nobody is going to die if the desk lamp draws 61 watts instead of 60. 99.9999% of what the government buys isn't a part for a fighter jet. It's office supplies, road salt, and sandwich bags. Do you REALLY need your government forms to be on certified milspec paper?
Except it's usually a light bulb for a control panel on an aircraft carrier.
The government gets decent prices on most things they buy. The lowest bidder wins, so there's always price pressure.
The whole article is about the fact that government contracts actually offer SMALLER margins than commercial/private contracts and sales.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
for the US Army there is PM CHESS and if you have a CAC you can access the purchase list. I have looked items up such as monitors, etc, and the price is not bad at all. Is it the lowest? No, but they are also paying for a guaranteed delivery date. That being said, the prices are competitive to big box stores askin to what we would pay as private citizens.
Same with typical IT/IS/telephoney services. The Government can look at the commercial sector and see the rates and they have a baseline. There is some additional cost to do work with the government so that is factored in, but, trust me its very slight.
So... what happens? What makes it cost soo much? I'll do my best to idenfity what I have found.
1) Unqualified people making poor decisions. I see this a whole lot. Someone will get a GS job due to prior military service (as an officer) and have no real PM experience in the technology they are actually dealing with. There is a difference between managing a military division and a product or service that is IT in nature. But, these people find their way in and make horrible decisions. Spend a lo of money on funding prototypes or owrking models amongst various companies. It can just spiral down from there.
2) PM's not famaliar with the technology or services required. I have seen GS's sign off on someone pulling 50 feet of 50 pair CAT3 cable for ISDN for $5k. No, really. This usually happens because the guy/company that did this knows that the GS guy has no clue and he has every economic incentive to "go for it". Even if they GS does find out, he/she will be more concerned about their career than reporting this mistake.
3) Poor requirements analysis as well as poor alternative sources of COTS equipment. This kinda related to unqualified people doing the job. It's difficult to work with the GSs like I do. I mean, there are a lot of times where we are stunned as the GS guy wipes the table off of all the hard work we did coming up with an agnostic specification for a particular product or service they want. We make it agnostic so that we can have as many companies bid on it for them. But, no. They'll wipe that clean and then arbitrarily choose something for whatever reason and then they get fleeced. Not only that, the month of work by a team of four people has still been paid for and that effort was entirely unrealized.
4) No concept of how the money is spent. This is like #3 above. Just wiping out a lot of work over something petty. I have seen high-level GS's summarily reject a deliverable and demand that it gets redone. What they don't realize is that without going through the official process of refusing delivery of a product (or whatever) they are still paying the same people to do the job again. This happens a lot more than it should.
5) Trusting the wrong people. Those GS's might be trusting the wrong GS (who is inept) or rely on the input from a matrix position contractor. I had an issue when I was in the Navy over air pressure sensors. The Navy price was $4k but I could find them for $10 in quantities of 100 from the manufacturer itself. As the port engineer worked for the same company as the manufacturer of the equipment that was to recieve the sensor it went no where. I tried to push it but I just got in trouble, why?
6) Afraid to admit to a mistake. No really, we are all human. We make the best decision with the information we have been provided with at the time, usually we try and do this. But, sometimes a factor was not accounted for or simply put a bad decision was made. They'll just keep going. There is such a desire to be the perfect boy scout that no one will admit it when they drop the ball. And, this can get really bad when they are all doing it. They all know it and silently acknowledge it but they just keep truckin' along because it's not "their" money.
Or perhaps he actually has some experience with aircraft. Counterfeit bolts are a HUGE issue as is quite a few other things that are supposed to be specced properly and are built in China. Everything from bolts to beams for bridges have had problems - ask San Fran about the latter. It takes all of 5 seconds to find PLENTY of evidence that counterfeit bolts are a problem in multiple industries. Counterfeit electronics are also an issue and for the military this is 100% unacceptable unless you would like to find yourself in a jet fighter coming apart because of it. If you think that it all comes off of the same assembly line you've got a screw loose yourself...
http://www.choice-distribution...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
www.asminternational.org/pdf/Aug8-12.pdf
The new Bay bridge in San Fransisco had a problem with heat treated steel bolts anchoring the superstructure. As reported in ENR (Engineering News-Record) the long anchor bolts were to be zinc protected. As these were heat treated the proper zinc application was to be via a cold impression process to not disrupt the heat treatment. However, because of the extreme length and weight of the bolts, and the lack of access to a process line to accomodate these bolts, it was decided to use a hot zinc dip process line. This change in the zinc processing did NOT get attention. Subsequently, the hold down bolts were installed and upon torque down the bolts cracked. Big problem. But the initial bolts were manufactured to specs. The botched corrosion protection was the issue. At the discovery of the problem the bolts were embedded down 20 feet into a concrete foundation. Details.
And it still isnt working 8 months after due date.
This may be true, but what you're missing is that the extra cost isn't in special fabrication methods - but in the TESTING process. So they may make 100 batches of bolts, each with 10,000 bolts in them. They'll test a subset of these batches and if they pass they'll sell them as mil-spec bolts. The ones they don't test they sell as non mil-spec. In theory they might all be the more stringent category, but just not tested....
*note this isn't true for all components, but it definitely is for some.
In Oregon they contracted with Oracle to create their state's health care website. Disaster ensued. Perhaps you are retrospectively selective on just who is a "leading commerical IT company"?
so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts,
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest. You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
I've just recently had a commodity PC that, for some reason that nobody understands, will freeze up for up to fifteen minutes while booting, and then continue on as if nothing was wrong. Same as all the other PCs I've bought from this vendor, but none of them do that. They can't reproduce the problem because they use Windows and Windows doesn't invoke this particular bug.
In the more distant past, the wonderful company called VIA (Chinese, but the "other" China) changed the specifications for the IEEE1394 PHY chip that is used in many 1394 interface cards. I had previously tested and vetted that PHY as suitable for the data collection systems I put together, and then one system just didn't work like it was supposed to. I checked the interface card to make sure it had the "right" chip on it. I swapped two apparently identical cards -- one worked, one did not. I looked at the specs I had already downloaded for it. The problem couldn't be that, it must be somewhere else. Long story short, I looked at debugging output from the system and yes, indeed, the chip specs had changed in a significant way and was no longer suitable for my projects. I now have to go out of my way to make sure that I buy cards with the one PHY chip that I know has the correct specs, and I have to tell others who think "it says its a Firewire card, it should be ok" that THEY have to look for specific chips on those cards, too. (Agere, FW series, BTW.) In other words, I've had to come up with a "procurement document" for something as simple as an IEEE1394 interface card.
Further, in many cases, the procurement rules the government comes up with is because, in the past, people who shouldn't be making decisions about what to buy have decided "that's good enough" and wound up wasting money when it turned out there were considerations for what was "good enough" that they weren't aware of. It is easier, and cheaper, to hand someone in an office a document that says "this is what you are going to buy" than to come back later and fix a problem when what they bought doesn't actually work with the other things already there.
... and throwing them away when they break.
And there's yet another reason for procurement (and disposal) rules. Throwing things away when they break and buying another one is more costly in most cases than simply buying the right, working thing from the beginning.
And you do not want government employees deciding to "throw things away" without rules for that, too, because too many government employees will "throw things away" -- and then take the thing they've thrown away home, or sell them on eBay, because it wasn't really broken, they just wanted to make a little extra money.
The government buys a lot more copier paper than they do aircraft carriers . 99.99% of light bulbs are just light bulbs, to illuminate some closet or desk in some office building.
I think you missed the point of the article. It wasn't about the great efficiencies of the government procurement process and how there is so much competition. The article was about the fact that so many companies do NOT bid - either because they aren't allowed to, or.more often because the bidding process costs $150,000 for what should bea $250,000 purchase. If you were guaranteed to win, you'd bid at least $$400,000, but your not guaranteed, so spending $150,00 on a bid in HOPES of winning only makes sense if you bid $1 million - the payoff if you win is then high enough to justify spending the time and money on the bid process.
I have a friend who makes his living from a government contract. He buys blood glucose meters from a company for $10,000 and sells them to the government for $25,000. His contract is pretty safe because no competitor wants to spend $25,000 trying to bid a competing contract which they might not win.
The other thing is that the parts are traceable. That bolt from Wal-Mart probably can't be identified who was the original manufacturer, when it was manufactured, who manufactured it, who was working at the factory that day, where the metal came from, etc.
The item itself is cheap. The documentation is not. An aircraft bolt will have a serial number engraved on it that traces it back to the factory it was produced from, and when it was produced, who was working and signed off on it, tests on random samples during that shift, and even where the wire the bolt was made from originated and their composition and lab tests.
Because in case the bolt actually fails, they can see if it's a one-off failure, or if every bolt of that batch needs to be recalled and changed because it's defective.
The problem happened in the 80s - there were tons of parts brokers who were shady and often re-tagged expired parts as new or factory overhauled. It was so bad that the faulty counterfeit parts made it into Marine One (It's not Air Force One until POTUS is onboard) which sent the FAA into an enforcement tizzy that put a whole bunch of brokers forging tags into prison.
Like I said, the documentation on these parts is insane. It's also why a 30 cent bolt from Wal-Mart costs at least $5, $10-30 being more typical.
I can't believe how dysfunctional the whole system is, I tried to supply Software development services to a County agency only to find out that there was a mountain of glutenous beauracracy trembling with anticipation to block and stymie any remote appearance of progress. It was as if the processes were *designed* for stagnation and nepotism...
Many govt officials survive on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
Heads I Win. Tails You Lose.
Casteism
Yes. Because someone has to maintain that box, and they're probably maintaining many many others. Someone has to deal with it when it doesn't work the way it is supposed to, or has to treat it in special ways because it doesn't fit in with the rest. You've apparently never come across "identical" computers or hardware that was different in subtle yet significant ways. I have.
And this is worth paying many times the normal price?
Somehow, every other corporation in the country gets along just fine buying regular white-box computers, or typical Dell stuff, and not some overspecced overpriced crap. Their IT departments manage just fine with the normal-priced stuff. Even the defense contractors that supply all this expensive highly-tested stuff to the military manage to do just fine with Dell's regular offerings. But somehow, random government agencies absolutely need something special? I call bullshit.
i disagree. walmart can source much better and quicker than the government.
Yes, now go lookup what happened with their manufactured (in China) steel decking that wasn't quite up to spec. Details...
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
These tendencies are general bureaucratic tendencies and can also be observed in private industry, but generally only when the inbound money is so huge that bloat is an affordable luxury.
Some government offices work better than others.
Others... yeah.
Futurist Traditionalism
I don't do projects anywhere near the scale of the article's examples, but we have to follow EU procurement rules.
I sympathise with the companies that bid for our projects, we have to advertise our procurements over certain limits (around $150k) throughout the EU. We have to be specific about what we want before we start (fairly impossible for off-the-shelf software solutions without unfairly exempting some suppliers) so the suppliers (or their salesmen) have to spend quite a bit preparing bids. Most of them will fail, so the winner has to recoup the cost of failed bids in any bids they win, so the're always looking to add costs to the contract.
I understand the reasoning behind the rules (stop people giving contracts to friends/family/golf buddies) but we usually end up paying well over what you know a local company could deliver for if you went direct to them and worked through a more agile process with fair billing. Having to control the costs of evaluating hundreds of bids from companies across the EU usually means that you set up a PQQ process to eliminate most small to medium shops that would probably be much better value.
I don't have an answer to how the process could be improved, but it's not great from either side.
"look up". ("lookup" is a noun.)