Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
>> U.S. government is spending way more than it has to on IT outsourcing.
I thought this was by design.
The words "IT Outsourcing" in the headline are unnecessary.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
It helps to understand that the money in government IT isn't made by working for the government, or working as a contractor for the government. It's made being the guy who sells that contract to the government, or otherwise works as management/executive level in the contracting company (and does absolutely zero IT/etc work).
For the most part, the IT Fed and the IT Contractor are coming from the same pool of people. Many of them have bounced over at one point or another, and the overall salaries/benefits are roughly commensurate (i.e., you might get less pay as a Fed, but more vacation, while your contractor counterpart has less vacation, but higher base pay, etc). Some of them are pretty good, but others... less so. The best and brightest also tend to get lured away by the private sector.
I've work for state and Federal Gov't. as well as small, mid-sized, and Fortune 500 companies. In my experience there is nothing as inefficient and wasteful as a Fortune 500 company. Small to mid-sized businesses were the leanest and most efficient, with gov't. coming in behind them.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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