1.01.10 - The Imposition -

[Beet]

As a 7-year web developer, programmer, software engineer and infrastructure architect with 4 1/2 years in the Federal sector, I am not optimistic about this web site. When I was a government contractor the primary problem was not the technical side but the bureaucracy.

For example, to order a new set of servers would often take 5 months, from allocating the money, making the order, taking delivery, acquiring physical space, setting up the connections, migrating the data, and so on. Each step required lengthy approvals and audits, not to mention tests. Something that we could do in maybe two or three weeks thus was stretched out to months or even years. And this was within one agency.

There might be a configuration change that I could do that would take 15 minutes. However this was impossible because of the rules. This task might be stretched out over 4 hours, including the creation of a test plan for environment 1, a test results report for environment 1, a test plan for environment 2, a test results report for environment 2, a written justification of the change, a back out plan, and so on. Then it goes to the change control board, which meets once a week. At the board any one of maybe 10 people can reject the change. If it's rejected, I have to start over. If it's accepted, then I schedule the change during a maintenance window, which is again usually a prescheduled time, once a week.

Hence a 15 minute technical task can get stretched out to 2 weeks due to bureaucracy. God only knows what they are dealing with in rewriting 5 million lines of code.

[Beet]

The problem is in government everyone is trying to cover their ass. That's it. In the private sector there is high level demand for efficiency across the organization, because if a company isn't adapting, then it's going to sink. But in the government there is no imperative to adapt. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, is the motto. Which generally works. Government usually survives by doing the same thing today as it did yesterday. There's no downside to that. That's why making a change is so hard in government- it always introduces more downside than upside.

Except here, it is broke, and needs to be fixed, and fixed fast. This is totally alien to government. You have private sector imperatives in a system whose culture is totally against that. I can guarantee you that the top directors of this project are shoving the timeline down as hard as they can and they're getting massive pushback from all the little chieftains who have to do the implementation. The question is whether they can somehow fast-track it, whether political imperatives will be strong enough to somehow bring implementation entirely outside the existing culture.

[Beet]

Actually, I don't think that working out some sort of temporary hack (or a series of them) should necessarily be ruled out. The problem is they don't have six months. If they can't fully integrate systems, then they need to put the data into a temporary dump and then work out the integration later.