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Ugly No. 3: OK, you go before your board of directors and tell them the following: You've spent $170 million on an extremely strategic IT project, but it doesn't work; you don't know how much more money will be needed to make it work; you don't know when, even if unlimited resources are applied, it will work; you admit that ultimately the entire boondoggle might have to be tossed out and an entirely new project started; and the outsourcer doing much of the work denies any responsibility and says that starting from scratch would push deployment out at least three years. With such a track record, would you be expecting to keep your job? Well, over at the FBI, that's what the story is, and various officials with some say in the matter are calling the project "inadequate," "outdated," and "a catastrophic failure." The upshot is that the FBI has a 30,000 new desktops for agents and support personnel connected by a high-speed, high-security network, but has nothing to push through that network. The case files and related information that were to be the centerpiece of the project are still locked in their silos, inaccessible to the agents who have a clear need to be able to access and act upon them in real time. Meanwhile, Science Applications International Corp., the designer of the system, says the blame lies not with it but rather with FBI turnover and change requests from the bureau. Whichever way the finger of blame ends up pointing, this is a spectacular IT disaster that cannot be allowed to be repeated.
These and other public-sector IT initiatives are wicked challenges, and in some of the cases where they don't work there's at least an element of private-sector complicity (thank you, SAIC). But is it possible to consider that just as giant corporations with far-flung and disparate business units are undergoing wrenching change to simplify their internal operations, optimize interactions with customers, and present to the outside world a single face, perhaps it's time for the federal government to begin thinking that way as well? Maybe some consistent standards in project evaluation, scheduling, and management would help; maybe some best (or even just good) practices could be promulgated; maybe some of the terribly wasteful latency could be wrung out of timetables and budgets. For myself, I can get by another 25 or so years without another Stone Age advisory from the FTC on cyberthreats, but some of these other badly run efforts are crying out for some private-sector expertise. As legendary business-technology sage Casey Stengel once put it, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
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