InformationWeek -- Crash Landing Ahead? (FAA review)
This article illustrates how the FAA doesn't get things done.
techweb.cmp.com
Suprisingly, the article focuses on the new system, scheduled to be rolled out in 2003 rather than a Y2K system crash... Wonder how many people will be able to read between the lines on this.... Very scarey.
Excerpts:
[...]Similarly, the FAA's record on year 2000 conversions is especially bad. While nearly
all federal agencies have completed year 2000 assessments and are now renovating
code, the FAA has assessed only 38% of its systems-and that does not include an
additional 245 critical systems the agency has recently identified, according to the
OMB.
Still, thanks to its political muscle, the FAA successfully lobbied for the privilege of
conducting its own management and procurement reforms instead of submitting to the
congressionally mandated reforms that followed the "Computer Chaos" report (see
related story, "Federal CIOs Look Past Failures"). William Cohen, who while a
senator was the report's sponsor (he is now the Secretary of Defense), cited the
FAA's "consistently poor management" and called the agency "ill-prepared to
accept the responsibilities" of fixing its own problems. Nevertheless, the FAA was
allowed to go its own way. While other federal agencies are required to have CIOs
by the IT Management Reform Act of 1996-also known as the Clinger-Cohen
Act-the FAA was exempted and still does not have a true CIO.
[...]
Culture Of Denial
That proliferation of protocols and formats is typical. GAO investigators identified the
FAA as a software version of the Tower of Babel, with 53 programming languages in
use for 54 systems surveyed. The Host computer runs on machine code and the
Jovial language (widely used in the military), while other systems use languages
including AIX, Unix, and DOS.
A majority of the 10 distinct National Airspace modernization programs also lack
technical architectures, and the ones that did have a blueprint had mutually
incompatible communications protocols.
One thing that doesn't seem very different at the "new" FAA is the way it deals with
criticism. "They go into their shell and wait for people to go away," says the Senate's
Mullinax. "It's unbelievable that a government-funded organization has that kind of
culture."
[...] |
