US federal government wasting billions on buggy, risky software
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.
Governments should not lock themselves into proprietary software straitjackets unless there is no viable open-source option. Period. Democratic governments have a duty to their citizens to own their IT, and not have private-sector vendors effectively owning mass quantities of citizens' data. Several years ago there was not enough open-source software to be able to make this sort of demand, but today there is.
Alfresco competes in the US federal market and has a range of great customers there. It is shocking and a little sad to see how proprietary vendors compete for tax dollars. It's a bit shameful. There seems to be no recollection as to whose money the government is spending, on either the part of the government purchasing officers or the vendors selling to them.
It's my money and, possibly, it's yours, too. I routinely see $4 million (and up) prices put on $100,000 problems. Why? Because they can. Because the vendor is on the GSA schedule and so it's easy to buy their slop, even if no one in the purchasing entity has ever actually been able to use the code to ensure it will work.
This truly is shameful. Open source offers a better way. I'm glad to see the government buying more of it, but I'd like to see all code purchased by the US federal government licensed as open source (even if from Microsoft et al.), as then it would still be under the government's control.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
The solution: Get more quality vendors, products and services onto the GSA Schedule. As the article makes clear, vendors with schedules have huge competitive advantages. What it leaves out is the reality that, just like when we buy as individuals, when its just as easy for the government to buy quality as it is to buy slop, the government will buy quality. Getting a GSA Schedule is a confusing process, but there is help available. A helpful book is "Getting a GSA Schedule" by Scott Orbach (of EZGSA) and Judith Nelson (of GSA). Check their respective web-sites (EZGSA.com and GSA.gov) for upcoming seminars, too. The authors are also very receptive to phone calls to clear up the red-tape and govspeak.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. We can level the playing field when we get more open source onto GSA Schedules!!!
Write to your MP (or whatever you call them over there). I write to mine, frequently.
http://www.theopnesourcerer.com
Matt, how does someone from the big red N get in touch with you "privately"?
- Article fully researched?
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by JamesHauser
November 1, 2007 8:35 AM PDT
- Hi Matt,
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Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)I appreciate the intent of your post and agree with the point you are trying to make, however must respectfully point out as that your post was not throughly researched before publishing. I have been following the procurement process of FedBizOpps (the contract you reference in your first paragraph) and after reading the protests and all news articles related to it, there is another side of the story which you do not address. I have followed the procurement because of two reasons:
1) The current FedBizOpps.gov is horrible, and using it to find procurement opportunities today is a very cumbersome process
2) I used Symplicity's System in a previous job (see below)
One thing you fail to point out is that the $17 million dollar contract award to Symplicity will save the government $30 million over the proposal submitted by Devis. Your blog post seems very heavily sided towards Devis without all the facts. For full disclosure, do you have any connections to any of the protesters? Additionally, the information in the news regarding this procurement has really only been marketing/PR spins from the two protesters (ISC/Devis) and the winning company (Symplicity). The actual proposals have not been made public by the SSA (Source Selection Authority) therefore your post is purely speculative and a rehash of commentary from the losing bidders.
Having worked with United States federal procurement on a daily basis, I must tell you that one can not make an accurate assessment of a proposal without actually reading it. The job of the SSA is to make determinations as to the ability of the contractor to develop/build a system on time and on budget. Two different SSAs have selected Symplicity at a much lower cost to the US Tax Payer. I agree too, this procurement looks interesting at first glance, but if you look through publicly available data of other awards to Symplicity you'll see that they have received great past performance. In other words, looking at their past performance, and the $30 million differential, the risk (negligible) to the tax payer definitely is worth it. If you can't tell, I'm a small-government/fiscally responsible republican, and can't see how spending $47 million on this contract is a best value to the tax payer which is the position you are advocating.
Finally, having worked at a University that utilizes an enterprise web based system from Symplicity on both a technical and project basis, their product did indeed feel very open-source when I worked with it (Linux, MySQL, etc). Source code and APIs were readily available. Because the proposal hasn't been made public, I'm not sure what they proposed.
It's very unfair to bring up a pending procurement that has not yet been released nor delivered as "wasting billions on buggy, risky software". I really recommend you read the decisions rendered by the judge, research the past performance of all companies involved, and make an accurate assessment of the contract rather than propagating one-sided irrational FUD.