Slashdot Mirror
US Spends $1bn Over a Decade Trying To Digitize Immigration Forms, Just 1 Is Online (washingtonpost.com)
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."
Is there ANY government IT project that has been completed on time, under budget and exceeds specifications?
Where did the money go?
A billion dollars to put one form online? I would have done ALL of them for a mere fraction of that - in under a year!
Perhaps the contract was given to the same company who built the Obamacare website?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
"We can have the federal government handle X, the Euro's do it, after all!"
Except we don't have a European bureaucracy, we have an American one. There is just about nothing they can get right. Ever. Mass transit, health care, food subsidies, infrastructure, education, you name it: they fuck it up. They are incompetent, brainless boobs. They are trustworthy with nothing. Hand over the immigration budget to the border states and let them handle it.
I think it is about time the government starts to legally chase after the contractors who are just incompetent.
The unauthorized, anonymous official does not have a clue what he is talking about: "The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. “The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years,” said a current federal official involved in the project, who was not an authorized spokesperson and spoke on the condition of anonymity."
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.
This is what you get when you get a bunch of drag and drop coders and a bloated budget.
Put a project that should have been done in house into the hands of a private contractor? Check!
Stage a long series of cost overruns to ensure maximum profit? Check!
Screw over immigrants? Check!
Sounds like the program did perfectly.
"The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. “The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years,” said a current federal official involved in the project, who was not an authorized spokesperson and spoke on the condition of anonymity." Long live the waterfall.
...was Test Test. from the town of Testville, Testistan. Interestingly, his postal code was 90210.
That's a 6-digit UID you're replying to. But on the bright side, we have 50% less goatse.
If there is one thing that comes to mind when it comes to good online submission in the government it is tax returns. The government contracts out to online businesses and essentially offers a bounty for each successful return filed. Simply adopt a similar solution for other forums, make it so the bounty is only given for a form that results in being processed (instead of rejected for errors) and companies will put in their own reasonable filtering.
P.S. Please no comments about the complexity of the tax system in the US.
To be fair, the lawmakers required the project to always be updated to the very latest web-based standards. They were therefore legally bound to redo the entire thing every 3 months. The history of their git (originally RCS) repository includes code in everything from c-based binaries that implement the CGI standard to angular and d3-based single page apps.
The national debt has continued to increase an average of $2.25 billion per day since September 30, 2012. Losing a billion in a decade is practically frugal.
I"m not talking about placing them randomly all over the place.
Clearly mark out a wide trench, maybe half a mile wide or so, and within there and there only, load it up with mines. No need to harvest them back up, there are there to deter anyone illegally crossing there, period.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
...for that kinda money, we could have lined the border with Mexico with a ton of land mines, and solved a lot of the illegal crossings problems.
Teabag much? Did it ever occur to you that we might want some immigrants, some of who might even be Mexican? This is about legal immigration applications and forms, and really has nothing to do with dealing with the problem of illegal border crossings. But thanks for contributing your tangential and borderline racist POV to the topic at hand.
You should really consider your own signature quote before you post stuff like this.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
Liberal pansy.
The only solution is to simply take everything down to the Darien gap, than build a wall and minefields, which will be much shorter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Incompetent program managers - probably received MBA from University of Phoenix, Park University or Western Governors' University.
Greedy contractors - IBM in this case, but Booz-Allen, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and British Aerospace all have government software divisions.
Flawed processes - Use the waterfall method and draw out the process for as long as possible (already identified).
Incompetent programmers - Hired former enlisted military software engineers that learned all the languages and operating systems, but none of the theory.
Changing requirements - Added and deleted dozens of fields requiring redesign of the database, web forms, etc.
Political wrangling - The goal is to make coming to this country harder not easier!
May the force be with you.
Yeah way back in 1936 the Hoover dam was under budget. Today, about the same amount of money is spent on the repeated environmental studies of the Keystone pipeline upgrade. Sad.
What's extra sad is that 99% of people don't realize Keystone already runs from Canada to Texas. The upgrade would have meant newer, safer pipes and fittings (along with larger pipe).
And Jon Katz.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Don't tell me, let me guess. It's the INS form to apply as a candidate for the US presidency.
Have gnu, will travel.
Some people might this it's easy to bring a form online but when you're dealing with government magnitudes you're playing on an entirely different level. Huge databases, security, storage, sync, backups etc. It's not an easy task.
Come on now, guys. How stupid can you be?
How naive can you be? This isn't about "shoddy planning" or missing requirements. Those are symptoms.
Immigration is a political football. The immigration service is completely politicized, employing bureaucrats that bend to the will the prevailing administration, overlooking whichever laws need to be ignored and neglecting whichever projects need to be neglected, to avoid getting fired. The Powers That Be DON'T WANT an efficient, cost effective system, or they'd have applied the necessary attention to achieve it. They prefer the unmanageable, un-measurable, un-traceable mess just as it is.
The project was doomed before it started.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
No, pick me, I'll do it for 75!
It's one helluva form!
Dark Reflection
Great.....the race to the bottom again, just like that guy who bid $1 for that Open Source government thing......
Article doesn't answer the question of why?
Even the initial premise it would cost half a billion to digitize 90 forms and keep a data base seems absurd. What is so special that it has needs that would cost that much. A high school class project could do that it a month. Survey monkey could do it.
Sure it might be shitty and scaling the backend tricky. But not very tricky. Now spend a million ir even two and you could do it well.
A billion? Why?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Think about what happened in that time period. There was no way the current administration was going to let this project go forward with requirements from the previous administration. Hope and change.
I haven't seen Rick Astley in a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
But how will the Clovis civilization kick out the "Native" Americans?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
All I need is a green card.
Hey, I was wondering where the goatse went. And the alt.sex.hamsters.ducttape.
Ahhh.. the old days of natalie portman and hot grits... Which I still don't fully get to this day...
--WooooHoooo--
That's.. TRAILER-loads.
*** Don't be dull.***
Turns out actually all of the forms are online; it's just they concatenated them into this one document, and you can just fill out whichever of the 6000 pages you find relevant.
Note however it's just a PDF to download, you must print all 6000 pages in triplicate to file. Don't forget to initial every other page or your application will be denied.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not sure I understand the problem. I frequently face forms that are not digitized. My handwriting is terrible so I scan the pages of the paper form and OCR them, whip out Acrobat Pro and convert them to a fillable form. Then I correct any errors and save the blank form. This blank fillable PDF form can be used by anyone on any standard computer. Any data entered via keyboard is easily legible and can even be spell checked. Similar forms are used by many government agencies and millions of businesses.
Next, I type out whatever data is requested of me, add an image of my signature, and email it to whoever requested it. Altogether this takes ~2 hours because I am not proficient with Acrobat.
I suspect that with practice I could do 10-18 forms a day depending on complexity.
I could probably design and produce a form from scratch within one day.
So what's the problem at Immigration Services?
...omphaloskepsis often...
I can understand a company padding out a government contract, after all, as far as the people running the Immigration Services, it's not their money, but this is taking the piss.
The EPA and State Department both issued reports saying there was no significant net environmental concern. Some of Obama's donors (especially one who ones the railroad) didn't like that, so they had the study done again. Still, no worries. Still, the guy who owned the railroad didn't like it. So Obama had the EPA and State department keep re-doing the study until one of them got the answer his the railroad owner wanted.
Normally, saying a study is "railroaded" is just a figure of speech. In the Obama administration, it's LITERALLY true.
If they digitize, they could no longer request the same formsevery six months so as to drag out the process years. The current way lets them send you a letter saying they need form X. Sfter you send it in a second time you get another letter months later asking for form Y that you've sent in originally. Finally, the ask for more information not in the original list of required information. After several years later you go for an interview and dicover none of the updated information was sent to the embassy and all they have is your years old package.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You idiots really think we need to shovel more money into organizations (I use that term loosely) like this?
http://www.freeusenetnews.com/... :D
I have no problem with legal migrants, some of which might indeed be Mexican.
Those coming in legally, via the official border crossings, would not have any problematic encounters with the minefields I mentioned earlier which would be clearly marked, and span the rest of the border. Those are there ONLY as a deterrent from people sneaking in illegally.
I still fail to see what your problem is?
I don't mind people immigrating into this country....I just want them to officially sign the fucking guest book on the way in.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Suppose a company bids $x on a new government project. The government should state that the bid is not complete unless it includes information about the company's track record of previous government projects:
1) List all government projects in the last 10 years, for which the company got paid at least $x/2. This list must include the name and contact information of the project customers (the government organizations that paid the company for the projects).
2) How did each of these projects turn out? Was the product or service delivered, on time and within budget? (The government organization that's receiving the current bid should also ask the customers how the projects turned out.)
3) If the project did not complete successfully, on time and within budget, then why not?
4) If the project did not complete successfully, on time and within budget, then did the company warn the customer, before the contract was signed, that there might be problems?
5) In each of the listed projects, what did the company do to protect the project from loss of power and communications, flooding, hackers, etc.?
Governments should consider this information, when they decide on which company to award a new contract. And this information should be made publicly available - both as a public service, and to shame companies that have a bad track record.
Or do they not count the ones partially rolled out? I filled up my green card application online, and got my interview, etc, through it.
It wasnt rolled everywhere at the time, and there was a few minor hiccups while on site (my stuff was in the system, but the person doing the interview didnt have access to it, whoops!), but it seemed like they were pretty close to having an end to end solution.
Most of the rest of the process was online and worked fine though.
Did that go away?
Meh, there's the better part of a million of you 6-digit folks. Plus, there's only 50% less goatse because there's 15x more beta sucks posts. For the real classic experience you have to browse at the secret -2 setting.
My guess is that forms code can actually be much more complicated. My work ~300k lines production and another 200k of tests.This is something that is basically a combination on SharePoint, GoogleDoc, and Live + support for some in house accounting products to "sync"/collaborate online. Anyways, about even 8 each over the last 7 years of UI and backend devs. So either you are using a lot of libraries, you are really that good, or CAD is much, much less complicated.
My guess some combination of 1 and 3. CAD basically things have to touch. Business rules: can be all over the place. Fill in lines 10-15, and 20 except if a non-profit and then only 12, except if you incorporated before 2008 in the UK or are a resident of New Zealand. ... things are a lot less structured when it comes to forms I think and each different combination adds a branch that needs to be unit tested and opportunities for regressions that have to be tracked down and fixed every time you touch something.
They should all be fired. If I could arrest them for incompetence, I would.
Liberal pansy.
The only solution is to simply take everything down to the Darien gap, than build a wall and minefields, which will be much shorter.
Shush!!! Don't say that aloud you will give presidential candidates ideas.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
A ton of extra complexity comes in when you (whether "you" are the federal gov't, a state, or some company) contract out a task to some company, but it's not a commodity type of service or product. It means that you still have to set the requirements and basic design, you have to coordinate with your contractor, and you have to keep them in line as far as meeting your requirements, budget, and schedule. When they have a delay or cost overrun (and legally speaking, there is some big or small change order you made they can point to as an excuse) you have to scratch your head and try to figure out whether it's legit or it's the contractor milking you.
The saving grace of contracting is the idea of "fulfill everything promised on time under budget or forfeit payment". In theory that keeps everyone honest and actually shields the client from risk. But it doesn't work on complex projects because there is usually at least a couple big or small change orders the client had to make at some point, and the contractor can point to those as a legal excuse for all overruns and delays. Seattle Tunnel Partners (a company that totally screwed up a road construction project in Seattle) is doing that right now. Even if you do a good up-front design and stick to it, a large project will end up needing a couple changes. That's not a big deal for an in-house project but it complicates a contracting process immensely.
Then on top of that, government and large organizations are more at risk of corruption than very small companies, because the people making the decisions aren't the owners. So there are processes in place to minimize corruption but that also make things more cumbersome and bureaucratic.
This all boils down to the this: as you move along a scale from small, simple, and conventional to large, complex, and new, the contracting process becomes less and less efficient and effective. For both the client and the contractor, as you move to bigger projects a higher and higher share of total effort gets sucked into just administering the contract, until that is the overwhelming focus of effort and actual productive work is a side task.
So what's the solution? For these big, tough projects, just drop the contracting method altogether. Do it in-house. Have a federal agency that does in-house software development for the other agencies. For big agencies or departments, give them their own in-house development team. When you need something developed, give it to them. But crucially, don't treat it as a contractor. Run it like a lab. Fill the agency with talented people who are permanent employees--when they finish a project they move on to a new one. Have a rough idea of what time and resources tasks will take but let the team just work on it and take however long they need. If you treat them well and make the work seem valuable you don't need to crack the whip; the developers will advance the project of their own free will.
Give the developers reasonable control over the work. Give them objectives and try not to give too many constraints. These developers don't have the conflicts of interest contractors have so you don't have to fuss as much over holding them to the contract. Just tell them what you need and let them do their thing. Have them iterate the product--make something preliminary that works, then improve it and add features over time, at whatever pace they can manage. This is a better way to do software, and it is much more feasible when you don't have a contract with fixed requirements and a fixed schedule. This method both accommodates and resists feature creep much better too. Instead of "Include Low Priority Feature X in Version 1, because once the product is delivered we won't be able to add it to the requirements!" you can just say, "Feature X is desired but low priority. Focus on getting Version 1 out soon and then we will have you continue development for followup releases until all desired features are complete."
Just get some decent developers, give them a ta
I worked on the most recent iteration of this ( the second successful version) if anyone has a real questions about it (that I can actually answer). One thing is it wasn't just 1 large shit of an IT project. About 3 full architectures were completely scrapped and MANY people fired. IBM itself were assholes who architected an IT project to include as many of their licensed middleware solutions as possible...then that failed miserably too and ...back to the drawing board.
There was one moderately successful version of it that was migrated off of.
This is the current reference to the project: http://www.uscis.gov/uscis-eli... (and the current design supports about a dozen forms and counting ).
Haven't you worn out your CTRL, V, and C keys yet? (Or CTRL, SHIFT, and INSERT)?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Is there ANY government IT project that has been completed on time, under budget and exceeds specifications?
This one, obviously. $100 for a scanner, $1B for black projects.
And I'll do it for only $10m. Should be a nice way to spend 6 months before I retire early.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think you meant "pay the thousands and thousands of dollars for every attempt to file" instead of "sign the fucking guest book". Don't pretend it's a quick trip to the DMV to immigrate legally. As long as money can flow across that border more easily than people there will be illegal immigration. You are calling to protect the status quo which guarantees illegal immigration will continue. This is not difficult to understand.
I love how government gets the blame here. Government doesn't actually develop anything in house anymore. When everything you do is done through consultants and firms trying their very best to bleed and suckle the taxpayer teat dry it is hard to do anything right. Private sector to the rescue.
That isn't to say that government hasn't had their hand in mismanagement, they probably do, stuff like political interference do come into play. Not to mention that any very large project of that scale is difficult to do for anyone, including the private sector.
I can't disagree with anything you said, but will only add that many if not most of those things are made worse the longer a project goes on for. You get actual changes in government with different agendas, new staff assigned from project managers to content experts, etc...
Many times due to the procurement rules, contractors bid ultra low, then pump up the costs by making everything a change order. Is that the fault of government or the contractor?
Anyway I have seen both sides, with about an equal measure. Many times a contractor or company will oversell what they or their software can do. I've been to some development meetings that were more like sales pitches (which makes me roll my eyes). At the same time I have seen requirements flip back and forth because they can't decided what the policy is or what upper management will agree to... I've also seen new management basically take a new "direction" or "strategy" that basically destroys pretty much all your previous work, making you start over, somehow declaring it a "success", then immediately moving on to their next high paying job, leaving the mess to the next manager, who will take a new "direction" or "strategy"...
Australia spent a ton of money (figures of 1 billion were rumoured, but may be exaggerated) on an immigration system called GVP, (Generic Visa Processing) and then canned it a couple of years ago because they couldn't make it work properly.
A form was set up successfully.
Now that the government has demonstrated its reliability, let's hand over all health care activity to unelected officials.
This is clear, irrefutable proof that single payer, political oversight by the IRS, and the treasury confiscating all bank accounts exceeding $10k will usher in the perfection of society and the shared prosperity as described by HRC, BHO, and Walter Mondale.
don't forget the apk spam.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I worry about conflating storing forms in digital format with their validation. These are separate concerns. If you're literally replacing paper with digital storage, you don't need to validate anything. The users still need to do their due diligence in filling out the forms, and the govt. monkeys still need to do whatever they do to check compliance with law. Except that now no paper is involved in handling the form itself.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The cost (hopefully) of up front doing the obvious validation means you don't need a lot of manual checking and/or you save a lot of back and forth getting the right data. I think that is why it is linked: the whole point of digitizing isn't to get rid of the paper it is to automatize.