federal posts - The Open Road- Page 2

US Treasury wasting tens of millions on a $1 million problem

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CMS Watch's Kas Thomas is reporting that the US Treasury is asking to bump up its content management budget from $16.9 million to $28.2 million. Kas further notes that the budget is for commercial off-the-shelf software not consulting bloatware.

It also likely means no open-source software (Alfresco, Drupal, etc.), which is the only way that the Treasury could manage to waste tens of millions of dollars on a $1 million (or so) problem. Other departments within the US federal government (US military, most notably) are weaning themselves from the proprietary nipple, as the federal IT spending report shows. But not the Treasury.

This isn't sour grapes: A wide range of US federal agencies already use open-source enterprise content management software (and other open-source software), including Alfresco. Rather, it's the same song that I've sung before about other wasteful government spending on proprietary bloatware. Governments shouldn't overspend on technology that locks citizen data into proprietary, private-sector software companies. Period.… Read more

55% of the US government dabbling in open source

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When you read things like this report from the Federal Open Source Alliance, you've got to feel for Microsoft, Oracle, etc. They're making bank today, but if open source trends continue, the future will look very different from today's lock-em-in and fleece-them-hard model.

Across the globe, governments have led the adoption of open-source software. The United States, however, has tended to lag behind (followed by the United Kingdom). Recent numbers, however, indicate that we're picking up open-source steam here in the USA.

Consider the following numbers gleaned from FOOA's survey of Department of Defense, Federal civilian, and Intelligence IT executives:… Read more

US federal government wasting billions on buggy, risky software

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Devis just lost its bid on a big US government software contract through the GSA (General Services Administration). That's just competition. But how it lost that contract is exceptionally frustrating if you're a US taxpayer:

GSA told Devis at its debriefing that contractor risk was not a determining factor in the award decision, despite the fact that a majority of the evaluation panel found the [winning] Symplicity proposal to be "unacceptable" and offering "little confidence" of successful performance.

I'm all for a software proposal that stinks at the outset. How about you? :-)

Taking this one step further, I'm positive that the US federal government is also not taking into account just how risky every purchase of proprietary software is. Every dime of my tax dollars that is spent locking up government files (Microsoft Office) and/or content (Microsoft Sharepoint), email (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus/Domino), database records (Oracle, IBM DB2), etc. is money thrown down the overpriced toilet. The US military alone, as the Government Accountability Office notes, is wasting billions and billions of dollars on shoddy software that is only promised to work.… Read more