Tech Trials and Tribulations

Anyone who works using a computer knows that speed and up-to-date applications matter. Give an expensive worker an old, slow computer, and the effective productivity wanes dramatically. The money saved in not updating is wasted in multiples by requiring more people to do the job, slower results, etc. Older managers, still uncomfortable with technology, often do not know how to evaluate operational systems. For others, it is simply a question of figuring out how to replace what employees are currently using, rather than asking if there are new platforms and systems that actually might be more effective.

For larger bureaucracies, the notion of replacing computers or entire systems can be a matter of hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps more. The need to retrain, retool and reintegrate terrify even the most intrepid leader, adding unknowns and delays that may not be well-quantifiable. But in this hyper-accelerating world, tech systems need upgrades or replacement – or at least an evaluation – every 24 months! As the cost of the hardware escalates (including the number of people glued to it), pressures mount to place all the processing and memory in the clouds, simply giving workers the accessing screen and interface elements at the desk or on the road when they are traveling. And then there are the issues of security when the link between operating station and processing equipment are separated by miles and miles.

And for the managers of the biggest systems, there is this need to “cover your posterior” by selected big, old world brands, established vendor relationships, to implement the rather complex changeovers that are required to compete and provide services in a world dominated by Moore’s Law (speed of technological obsolescence and change) and Singularity Theory (e.g., if the year 2000 were one unit of change, by 2100, we will have experienced 20,000 year-units of change at the current rate).

The new innovative, customer-centric vendors are often too small to give managers of mega-billion-dollar companies and governmental units the comfort levels they need to recommend them. So instead, they engage vendors who are used to providing operational services in a world where connective interaction to lay members of the general public is the necessary skill-set. Talking to ordinary people, engaging people whose interaction with a site is limited to “once” or “occasional” is something those young and exciting new vendors simply have had to do to survive, and something the big operational vendors never have had to do.

Just about everything described above describes the Affordable Health Care website debacle. It all happened, and the reporting supervision, the on-going expert field-testing was simply missing. This horrific experience has drawn the nation’s focus to this rather obvious failure, but the government sits on all kinds of other shortfalls. For example, rather than replace computers that should be going to the Smithsonian as artifacts from our past, the Veteran’s Administration is keeping old, lumbering computers, but upgrading the software that was never designed to work on such ancient platforms. The result? Crashes, snail-paced processing, and constant tweaks to “get by.” The money saved in hardware will be paid many times over in the cost of human beings unable to get the job done within normal time limits.

As budget cuts, from the Sequester to the next round of contractions, slam into federal bureaucracies, we are actually spending more money working with systems that not only don’t fit for the job at hand but don’t even fit with computer systems used just about everywhere else in the federal system.  “Every day, The Federal Register, the daily journal of the United States government, publishes on its website and in a thick booklet around 100 executive orders, proclamations, proposed rule changes and other government notices that federal agencies are mandated to submit for public inspection.

“So far, so good… It turns out, however, that the Federal Register employees who take in the information for publication from across the government still receive some of it on the 3.5-inch plastic storage squares that have become all but obsolete in the United States…

“The use of floppy disks peaked in American homes and offices in the mid-1990s, and modern computers do not even accommodate them anymore. But The Federal Register continues to accept them, in part because legal and security requirements have yet to be updated, but mostly because the wheels of government grind ever slowly.

“Davita Vance-Cooks, the head of the Government Printing Office, which prints The Federal Register and publishes it online, spoke at a congressional hearing [in early December] about her department’s attempts to make its work remain relevant in a post-print world. Despite creating mobile apps, The Federal Register still requires agencies to submit information on paper, with original signatures, though they can create a digital signature via a secured email system.” Washington Post, December 6^th. That means most agencies that feed the Federal Register have to have floppy printers and readers… and have to send reams of paper for official impact. Oy. It’s a waste of time and money. Multiply these inefficient practices across tens of thousands of state, local and federal agencies that simply do not have the budget allocations to replace these machines. Penny-wise, pound foolish.

We need to routinize change, encourage new vendors with state-of-the-art knowledge and skills to qualify as acceptable government vendors more easily. Cut the red tape. Open the doors. The massive side benefit is the creation of new companies, new jobs and new values across the economy. We need to use that technology to increase government efficiency, not hold old systems on line too long requiring more bureaucrats to substitute costly labor costs for rather simple technological solutions. We need to invest in these basics or prepare to spend a whole lot more when the systems no longer work. Whatyawannabet the NSA has up-to-date systems?

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes it takes a horrific failure to wake Washington up to the face that there is a better and less expensive way to make government work.