who agrees whole hartedly with this article. Being an insider I know what it is like. Let me share with you the world of a county IT guy. First off, like all IT depts. we are under staffed. The county council is willing to spends hundred of thousands of dollars on a sinple project by outside vendors but are unwilling to hire in house staff that could do the same thing quiker and with less cost (my salary sucks).
Let me give you an example. My county recently partnered with a site to offer property tax payments online. Two county big wigs went to some conference where they were met by sales reps of this company. They were sold a bill of goods about how it could be implemented with no cost to the county. The company was invited to demo the product (I don't think IS staff were invited). The next the one of the county big wigs said we are going to do it (on a morning radio show). Now we are dumped with getting this project done quickly. Remember that this was not supposed to cost us anything but instead it took one or our programmers two months to get the complicated tax data in a format the site could use. Since it was introduced I think 4 people have paid their taxes with it. In a year when the contract is up they want to charge $12,000 a year. For that cost we could have developed it in house once.
This is just one of many examples where departments and county officials are sold on poducts by vendors with little or no cunsulting with the IS dept. Often times projects could be done in house (with a few more poorly paid staff members) using open source products and industry standards. Instead we are suck learning proprietary systems that don't work on our network and rarely work as sold.
We run a novell network, there have been a lot of products sold to the county that work only properly on NT networks. IS is supposed to approve IT purchases be we do so often under pressure from people above use.
To try and stop this I have proposed and developed a county standard to hook data is different systems together. It uses XML, HTTP, and TCP (all the proper buzzwords). Most department heads are on board but some still resist because their vendors will propably not want to implement it.
We are trying to use Linux more (DNS, SMTP
) and are continually having fights with MS licencing lawyers.
Bottom line, government IS staff often want open source but no one ever askes our opinion.
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who agrees whole hartedly with this article. Being an insider I know what it is like. Let me share with you the world of a county IT guy. First off, like all IT depts. we are under staffed. The county council is willing to spends hundred of thousands of dollars on a sinple project by outside vendors but are unwilling to hire in house staff that could do the same thing quiker and with less cost (my salary sucks).
Let me give you an example. My county recently partnered with a site to offer property tax payments online. Two county big wigs went to some conference where they were met by sales reps of this company. They were sold a bill of goods about how it could be implemented with no cost to the county. The company was invited to demo the product (I don't think IS staff were invited). The next the one of the county big wigs said we are going to do it (on a morning radio show). Now we are dumped with getting this project done quickly. Remember that this was not supposed to cost us anything but instead it took one or our programmers two months to get the complicated tax data in a format the site could use. Since it was introduced I think 4 people have paid their taxes with it. In a year when the contract is up they want to charge $12,000 a year. For that cost we could have developed it in house once.
This is just one of many examples where departments and county officials are sold on poducts by vendors with little or no cunsulting with the IS dept. Often times projects could be done in house (with a few more poorly paid staff members) using open source products and industry standards. Instead we are suck learning proprietary systems that don't work on our network and rarely work as sold.
We run a novell network, there have been a lot of products sold to the county that work only properly on NT networks. IS is supposed to approve IT purchases be we do so often under pressure from people above use.
To try and stop this I have proposed and developed a county standard to hook data is different systems together. It uses XML, HTTP, and TCP (all the proper buzzwords). Most department heads are on board but some still resist because their vendors will propably not want to implement it.
We are trying to use Linux more (DNS, SMTP ) and are continually having fights with MS licencing lawyers.
Bottom line, government IS staff often want open source but no one ever askes our opinion.