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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (173628)	7/14/2006 11:16:17 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793782

I don't know about FBI, but the NSA and CIA also have an IT problem. They hire a contractor to work up a solution, and before the product is delivered or sometimes after the fact, the specifications or objectives change, they toss out millions of dollars of work and start over. Upper management knows little or nothing about what is needed. They depends on underlings, and the underling who gets their ear is the slickest talker, the deep select for management groomee, or the person with the most charisma, not the person who knows what the hell he is talking about or has the best ideas. That person might not be the best communicator, but management has no way to judge the value of his ideas because they themselves are basically incompetent when it comes to IT issues. They are the product of the charisma world, deep select standards, and slick talking, and that's all they know. Also, there are deep suspicions and mutually exclusive goals between agencies, within agencies, and even with organizational units on the same floor of the same building. These affect the outcome as well. The end result is that a lot of good work is thrown out, the money wasted for no gain. Nobody is the wiser, because management doesn't really know a good egg from a bad egg. You can see the eyes on these guys glaze over when you start talking about metadata, third and forth normal form, and data semantics. Yet these things are the essence of data infrastructure and you must have them working smoothly in order for an IT tool to do its job. Management doesn't know what it wants until you don't give it to them. It's a very serious problem. It's not exclusively a government problem, but perhaps it is primarily a bureaucracy problem, whether public or private. Companies like Google and eBay start up and thrive without a hitch because of one or two brilliant guys with a brilliant idea. Bureaucracies don't have that advantage.