Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Spends $1bn Over a Decade Trying To Digitize Immigration Forms, Just 1 Is Online (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the barely-better-than-nothing dept.

Bruce66423 writes: A government project to digitize immigration forms succeeded in enabling exactly one application to be completed and submitted after 10 years of work because of the botched software and implementation. The Washington Post reports: "This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials."

9 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. by AntronArgaiv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is there ANY government IT project that has been completed on time, under budget and exceeds specifications?

    1. Re:I'm beginning to see a pattern here. by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As my late father used to say, the Golden Gate Bridge could never be built today.

    2. Re: I'm beginning to see a pattern here. by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I know, on behalf of those of us who have been on many successful projects which used Waterfall, I find myself thinking "no wonder that clown didn't want his name used".

      Anybody who says it doesn't/can't work literally has no experience in running projects, and is so utterly unqualified to talk about it as to defy belief.

      This is finger pointing, and claiming how your new methodology is going to be so much better. Right up until the replacement project fails as well.

      But to say it hasn't been successful in 40 years? Sorry, you immediately lose all credibility and can't be taken seriously.

      Go ahead, build a bridge or a house without Waterfall. Let's see what you end up with.

      A bunch of people randomly doing some subset of what you need for completion and then trying again next week? That's no guarantee of anything, it's just smaller tasks to almost get right.

      Agile is no magic bullet, and Waterfall isn't some method which has been so badly discredited that nobody uses it.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:I'm beginning to see a pattern here. by asylumx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is there ANY IT project that has been completed on time, under budget and exceeds specifications?

      FTFY

  2. LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Taxpayer dollars wasted, what else is new.

  3. Re:This is why we don't trust them with anything by viperidaenz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I reckon it's because your country is run by campaign contributions and lobbying.

    You should start by putting limits on campaign spending and making all party donations public.

  4. They should have used the simplified form by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Here's what it looks like from the cheap seats these days.

    Question #1: Which political party are people from your country and socioeconomic background most likely to support once they have attained citizenship?
              a) Democrat
              b) Republican
              c) Independent or Other

    If you answered "a" in Question #1, you're all good - c'mon in! (Or should I say, "feel free to stay, amigo.") If you answered "b" or "c" prepare to sit the better part of a decade in an obscure queue, punctuated with long in-person visits to official offices and annual threats of deportation.

  5. Re:But... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.

    OK, so the cheap shot here is IBM.

    But I often see these things and think to myself, there's probably a list of reasons why shit like this happens.

    Stupid conflicting policies, politicians angling for a little pork for their constituents, politicians who want to fuck up the system to show why government can't do these things, bad vision to start with, departments dickering over their own little information silos, competing agencies trying to get you to use their system to help them pay for their own mistakes.

    I frequently think this kind of thing happens as much from mismanagement and meddling by the people who started the process as anything.

    And I've seen a few cases where people want to blame the vendor because it's just easier, but the vendor had to put up with tremendous amounts of dithering an inability to make decisions from the players.

    Yes, sometimes the vendor falls short. Yes, government can fall short. But sometimes it seems like there's too many competing agendas, and individual players dropping in and trying to redefine everything. Delivery of anything is doomed from the start because they don't know what they want.

    You never get to know the real truth, but in a lot of ways I bet an objective understanding of how things go so horribly wrong would be interesting. Usually, however, it's almost impossible to get an honest evaluation of what really happened ... because so many asses have been covered the truth has been buried under an avalanche of finger pointing.

    Hell, I've see these kinds of things fail because the original sales people lied to badly what was being offered had no chance ... and I've seen customers redefine what they're looking for so often as to make it impossible to actually deliver the contract.

    Invariably some new PM or stakeholder wants to scrap everything done so far and use the technology they're most comfortable with.

    These projects fail, often spectacularly. And the difference between what the low-level people think happened, and what management things is often staggering. Because the higher up the org chart you go, the less reality is defined by what is true, until you get to a level where facts don't even enter into anything.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  6. Wrong end of the telescope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't think there should be limits on contributions private property and the disposition there of it, is the very corner stone of liberty. Once you start telling people how they can spend their own money,

    We don't want to tell private individuals how they can spend their money. We do want to tell public servants what kinds of gifts they can accept.