Comments on: How to blow $3 million in taxpayer funds (UPDATED)

Open source balances risk between buyers and vendors. Here's just one example of how the U.S. federal government could have saved itself a lot of money.

[ITsince67]

Standard operating procedure in government

This is a common story in state government.

I worked for the Commonwealth of Virginia's Dept of Information Technology (DIT) for over 10 years. State agencies could do projects with their own I.T. staffs, hire private companies, or..."give it to us". We often got projects after private companies turned down the project or ran into major problems.

Many projects are started without any real concept of what the requirements are. For some reason (they are never mentioned in public) someone in authority seems to pick a specific solution. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

We (DIT) would be brought in and would be told by the politicans that we had to agree to the customer agency's estimate for time and budget they set. Many times, our staff was not trained in the software they had selected - and no training was provided.

At the Dept of Medical Assistance, one project escalated up to something like $83 M (back in 1990) dollars with no end in sight. Staff from the Auditor of Public Accounts came in and reviewed the project and said the project staff had no concept of where they were, where they were going, how to get there, or who was defining the requirements. Someone, not working on the project, was identified as the scrapegoat (would take the political fall for things not working). Instead, he jumped out a window on the 25th floor. DIT supplied info to the local paper that described him under a different name and job title. Even those of us who worked with him, could not identify him by the write-up in the paper. The Manager who selected him, was then promoted.

A Big 3 accounting firm once spent $1 M studying something, but said they could not define the requirements. I was given the same task. For $335,000 my team designed, built, and installed the application. What thanks did we get? I was told I was incompetence cause I came in at 10% over the originate project estimate. The real issue here, is "they" did not really want a working solution.

In some cases, the bureacrats do not really want an automated solution. To have one, would require they reduce their staff or show improvements in their operations. So,....in my opinion, they deliberately mis-defined the requirements so the developers cannot complete the project. If you cut the number of staff they supervise - shouldn't you cut their title and pay?

I left DIT and went to work for another agency. Found a report where each month, each site (142), reviewed file folders (up to 2,000/site) to submit a report to the central office. The information in the file folders was in the central computer system. It took a programmer less than 1 hour to write the report. Thanks we got? I got told I was stupid for producing the report - that now "new work" would have to be found for the staff in the field so they would have something to do for the last week of each month.

My response? I resigned.

[rock_va2000]

PCAOB does not run on tax $$

My friend PCAOB does not run on tax$$, its not even a Federal goverment body. Check the website, its a private entity.

[Matt Asay]

Very true - my mistake

I have corrected the original post. But it doesn't change the fundamental idea in the post: CIOs should not waste money on proprietary licenses. It significantly increases the cost of failure.