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US Government IT Outsourcing Is Poorly Managed (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: The U.S. government is spending way more than it has to on IT outsourcing. That's the finding of a report released in September by the Government Accountability Office that studied IT services outsourcing at three military branches within the Department of Defense, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. According to the report, while efforts to better manage their IT outsourcing had improved, most of these agencies' IT spending "continues to be obligated through hundreds of potentially duplicative contracts that diminish the government's buying power."
I didn't see THAT coming!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
with Edward Snowden.
You don't have to hate or like the man to know they made a colossal mistake, giving a job away with a high level of access to a contractor.
Why only a fraction of external IT service spending is actually managed via an established contracting model in this day and age is bafflingâ"...
Don't you just want to slap people through the screen sometimes?
I see comments above talking about H1Bs and such. This is NOT outsourcing to India or anything like that. It's outsourcing to primarily U.S.-owned contractors, as opposed to U.S. Government (USG) employees. If you suggest that outsourcing is not the best technical solution, then you're suggesting the USG direct hires are as competent as those in industry. I can assure you that people don't switch to USG jobs for the technical challenges, however.
>> U.S. government is spending way more than it has to on IT outsourcing.
I thought this was by design.
I have sad news for you. It's not just the government that has poorly managed outsourcing. Pretty much every organization has poorly managed outsourcing. It's a poorly captured cost of outsourcing.
Anyone who has worked a federal contract for more than a couple hours would know this. Guess it takes the GAO a decade or two to catch on eh? Or wait until it is somehow politically advantageous to acknowledge.
contractors add overhead and dead time due to rules.
Like when they keep the same people but they roll from one firm to another firm with that triggering a new round of background checks.
People who sit idle unable to work as they can't get a login / etc as there paper work is not done but they are placed on site (as that can happen with more then one firm in the chain) I was idled at an IRS office for about 1 mouth before they said the we have to many people on the overall contract and a lot of them where cut.
Odd thing is on day one the work site people where like you did not get your fingerprints done? and the firm I was working for was like we are working on that.
Also there was one day that I was left some what alone on site as the other techs when to a nearby small office and later I was told that I should of not been left like that as my background checks / paperwork as not done yet. There are a few more WTF's from that office as well.
That certainly is shocking news.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly annoying?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Never thought I'd use this construct in a post, but...
All IT outsourcing is poorly managed. FTFY
The only difference between government and private sector is public scrutiny. I know lots of state IT workers (from the university system) and the universal refrain is that they don't even have budgets for the basics. This is a big departure from the right wing meme of government being awash in tax dollars and lavishly spending, and these aren't the stereotypical lazy worker types either. I think that a lot of the reality is that the money goes to outsourcing giants like HP, IBM, Accenture, etc. and it's wasted in the inefficiencies that this brings to light. I've been in lots of outsourced IT departments and do work for outsourcers. The problem with outsourcing is this -- the company doing the outsourcing is paying $X to maintain their own environment. To win the contract, the outsourcer has to come in at $X - $Y for the bid to be low enough to accept. (X - Y) has to be greater than their cost to make $Z off the deal, where $Z is positive margin. The business model of an outsourcer, therefore, is:
- Provide the lowest/cheapest level of service possible to prevent the customer from cancelling the contract.
- Offshore everything that doesn't require in-country staff.
- Negotiate an open ended contract where almost nothing is spelled out, and all changes are billed on a time and materials basis.
- Use this T&M framework to pump up profits by adding chargeable change orders for everything possible.
- Bury the customer in endless levels of process, in the name of ITIL, service delivery excellence or whatever. This justifies a whole raft of change managers, project managers and analysts to write the documentation required for something that was previously done internally with much less effort.
- Better yet, force the customer to adapt your Standard Operational Framework or whatever the outsourcer calls it. This means the same level of craziness, but you get to reuse processes across all your customers.
- Slowly bleed out the on-site IT staff who knew anything. This makes it extremely difficult for the company to decide to insource again, or move to another vendor. After a long contract, they're essentially helpless without the vendor because anyone who knows anything doesn't work for the company anymore.
Now, take that model and apply it to something as complex as a state or federal agency. Make all the records transparent, and wait for the media to run sensational stories about 'Your Tax Dollars are Being Wasted by Big Government." Private sector businesses waste tons of money on outsourcing too, but it's buried in all the accounting sleight of hand and certainly not out in the open for inspection.
I have had similar idling experiences working for state government as well as private companies. In Illinois we employ a large number contractors because it is very difficult to acquire talent. The rules are such that when hiring a direct employee the posting must be made available first to current state employees. They have first dibs. Only when there are no demonstrably (on paper) unqualified state employees put in for the position may it be posted to the public. And in that case there is so much red tape and beurocracy to wade through it could take months to get someone in the door. Instead they can hire a contractor, while costing more short term, is immediately available and has a much higher likelihood of being qualified because she or he was selected by the managers needing the work done. They may cost more in the short term, but contractors are not entitled to state benefits and pension. So the state does not have to continue to pay that contractor after he or she retires.
That person from the redundant Department of Redundancy again?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No other parts are outsourced too. Military, policing, writing laws for Corporate America, to name a few.
The solution is obvious: gov't should outsource its managing of outsourcing. The private sector does it better!
Table-ized A.I.
Because the IT contractors made the smallest contributions to the Senators who requested this review.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
I've worked for a wide variety of organizations and org sizes as both a contractor and employee. And I do notice a few general patterns.
First, almost all large organizations are poorly managed, gov't or private, relative to smaller ones.
Second, in the private sector you do have the pressure of competition to be a little more efficient and practical, BUT that pressure also creates more incentive to cheat and lie, which often offsets the competition-driven efficiency (if you don't measure on superficial things).
Most of us know that the difficultly of managing software projects is not linear with feature quantity. The "network effect" makes coordinating bunches of interactions more difficult relative to the feature "node count". This also applies to organizations.
Referring to Graph Theory models, you cannot count just the feature nodes to estimate complexity, but also the relevant interactions between all the nodes. You have to count both the nodes and the interactions between them (often called "edges", "arcs", "lines", or "links"), and link count usually does not scale linearly with the node count, but some higher order. (Not all nodes are typically connected, but it's still a whole lot of connections.)
I believe there's a single general term for this affect regarding complexity management, but the name escapes me right now.
Table-ized A.I.
The problem is with internal IT, is that if there is an issue, then there is someone within the organization to blame. The really hard jobs would go to the best employee, if it fails, then they will need to fire their best employee, or someone up the food chain if he kept adequate documents, stating that he said it was a stupid idea.
If you outsource, then if something goes wrong, you just raise your arms up and say, "Well if these supposed experts can't do it right, then no one can" and if there is a big failure, then you just switch to another company after the contract expires.
Outsourcing is a symptom of a bad corporate culture. Where you either don't trust your internal staff, or afraid of repercussions from any mistake made.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
IMO it's: //
s/US Government
I haven't seen an outsourcing project yet that's been well-managed. Usually it's because management sees the development teams as interchangeable, so they go about managing the outsourced project like they would've their in-house devs. Problem is that your in-house devs you can call into the office and threaten with loss of bonuses and/or job if they aren't getting things done right. You can't do that with the contractors though since they don't work for you and likely aren't even on the same continent and the contract with the outsourcing firm's usually written without any provision for penalties for failure to deliver a product that works correctly and to spec, leaving you with no leverage.
The problem is that management's been taught to look at efficiency over effectiveness. The two aren't the same thing.
A defense procurement program is managed by government employees but the military does not have factories etc. The current method is far from perfect but increasing the size of the government portion of this complex arrangement would not be an improvement.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I could probably mention a ton of things, but I'll only add two:
1) One of the big differences between Private and Government contracts, is the Government contact will have a lot of requirements that are mandatory, that no private one has to adhere to, all of which drive up costs. Things like FOI requests, and protection of personal information, all much stronger, in addition the procurement processes are usually supposed to be transparent and fair and because of tax dollars, elaborate and long. The procurement process can probably take longer than a lot of actual projects themselves!
2) Self righteous republicans, conservatives, private companies abound... Had an election not so long ago, where the conservative candidate is making himself sound like a master of industry, preaching all the usual garbage about smaller government, less tax, etc... that companies like he build with his sweat and blood are what generate wealth and prosperity etc... Which if you look into his background, made all his money in a software firm, who sells software and contracting services almost entirely to government, which got bought out by another company, which also sells software and contracting services almost entirely to government, who basically rip off suckle at the government teat (taxpayer money)... Unbelievable.
This podcast is very good on how outmoded and dysfunctional a our government IT bidding is
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/34-dmv-nation/
Wrong. Some definitely are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is due to an act of Congress.
WE are the enemy.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
is poorly managed?
Can someone please point me at any place that properly manages outsourced labor?
I've yet to hear any good stories about outsourcing from people who have to deal with programmers in India, for example.
And the people I know personally that have to travel to India to see "what the /fuck/ are you guys doing?!" and straighten it out, none of them are thrilled to have to do that part of their jobs. Every story I hear is tantamount to "shoveling shit against the tide."
--
BMO
This isn't news to anyone in the trenches.
In most companies that I have seen whose business was not technology related, the management treats IT like the computer janitors and incentivizes managers with the wrong things - almost always short term cost cutting at long term expense - all the time.
Some time later the long term expense kicks in to fix all the issues the initial cost cutting created and then we start the cycle over again.
It's all an fsck'in' fraud, and waste of tax dollars. Republican posturing "we save tax dollars by outsourcing, and not hiring"... is all bs. 100%
First, either they're hiring people on starvation wages (like that guy who was in the papers during the Shutdown, who works as a cook at the American Indian Museum, who couldn't afford to rent an apartment by the month), or the rest of us (ObDisclosure: I work for a federal contractor).
Let's see: I've been here over six years, a lot of folks I work with have been that, or more, including the woman who's been here AS A CONTRACTOR over 20 years. No, you do NOT "save" money: we're all getting benefits comparable to a fed employee... oh, and you're paying for our *company* project manager, and our *company* program manager, and, oh, yes, my company to make a profit.
Right - this is *so* much cheaper than just *hiring* us, and not paying any of that overhead. (What's the loading - 12%? 20%? 30%?).
And no, no company's going to do what we do - I mean, we won't add to the company profit in this quarter, so forget what we produce that many keep you alive five or ten years from now.
And Ayn Rand lived the last years of her life on Social Security and Medicare.
mark, wondering when someone's going to sue
the government under the Microsoft
ruling