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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?
"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.
...was Test Test. from the town of Testville, Testistan. Interestingly, his postal code was 90210.
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.
That's a 6-digit UID you're replying to. But on the bright side, we have 50% less goatse.
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 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'
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!
It's one helluva form!
Dark Reflection
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.
I worked for IBM over 15 years on many large scale projects. The second I read the headline, I knew IBM would be in there somewhere. This has kind of become the SOP for IBM in the last decade or so (State of TX, Disney, ServiceMbr Hilton, etc).
Ahhh.. the old days of natalie portman and hot grits... Which I still don't fully get to this day...
--WooooHoooo--