On Monday the White House announced the creation of a team of digital experts tasked with upgrading the government's technology infrastructure and making its websites more consumer friendly.
The move is aimed at avoiding a repeat of the website debacle that marred the rollout of President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation last year. While the administration ultimately surpassed its enrollment targets, the opening weeks of sign-ups were riddled with website troubles that raised questions about the administration's competence.
The new digital team will be overseen by Mikey Dickerson, an engineer who took leave from Google in order to oversee fixes to the HealthCare.gov site.
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Obama Takes Step to Improve Government Technology
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 12 2014, @02:50PM
And I sincerely mean that. The UK government created an in-house team not too different from this one, and the end result was that their websites and their government ministries actually ran much better. And by "better", I mean gave out better service (as measured by citizen satisfaction surveys an the like) at the same or lower costs.
It would certainly be an improvement over hiring an overpriced politically-connected IT firm on a no-bid contract like they did when building healthcare.gov.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday August 12 2014, @04:43PM
What, are you actually saying that just because it costs more that doesn't make it better? Horror of horrors, now they might actually re-think a few things. Oh wait, this is the government we are talking about, accidentally getting one thing right doesn't mean they will apply that knowledge elsewhere.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 12 2014, @02:52PM
The article is vague on whether this team has any authority to do anything or not. If all they do is make recommendations, this is just a waste of time.
The way to tell whether people in Washington have any power or not is whether they have the authority to direct where money is spent. If the President gives this team the ability to spend money, and direct where it is spent, then this is a good thing. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time. They'll produce handbooks (oops, they already did - red flag!) and recommendations that the career bureaucrats will ignore like everything else, and the current administration will be gone soon and along with it this digital team.
And "bring government digital services in line with the private sector" sounds kind of strange, since both the private sector and government outsource software development to the same consultants. What's going to be different?
I was trying to think of a Star Wars analogy to help you understand this, and then I remembered that the Death Star design was outsourced to insects. Fast forward a few years, and two Death Stars were blown up back-to-back by low-tech, low-budget rebels, which is what you get when a government hires lowest-bidder consultants.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @03:09PM
I agree. We will probably see about as much action as the last 3 times they tried this in the past 6 years.
The only reason this team got anything done was the major embarrassment the healthcare site was.
Our officials have little interest in spending optimal amounts or doing the right thing. But making sure their budget this year is big enough not to hurt next year (even though they are not sure what they need next year). http://www.usdebtclock.org/ [usdebtclock.org] vs http://www.usdebtclock.org/2008.html [usdebtclock.org]
But I wish them luck. We need our gov working together with each other to help us. Not to create gigantic sprawling spending machines. Will not happen though. :(
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @07:38AM
if a team of experts is given authority to spend taxpayer money, where do you think it will be spent?
1) companies in which the experts hold stock
2) companies in which the experts are employed or have family/friends employed or own
3) companies that give them the most stuff on the side, have the most comfy private jets, and host them for the most junkets
4) companies that have the most political clout with politicians that hold sway over the team
5) all of the above
6) on an objectively investigated cost-effective solution that best serves the interest of the american people
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @11:01AM
If the experts are any good, 1 and 2 are likely to be much better options than whatever is currently being done, even if they're not optimal, so it's still a net win. If furthermore the experts actually have any self-respect for what they do, 3, 4, and 5 are unlikely to happen to any significant degree.
Of course, this being the government, the "experts" are statistically unlikely to be any good in the first place, so the rest of the arguments are kind of moot.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @04:26PM
"Mikey Dickerson, an engineer who took leave from Google"
So Google IS the Government?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Tuesday August 12 2014, @04:52PM
Corporations have always been the government. When a new corporation joins the club they get a piece of the revolving door action. It's only fair!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @05:24PM
Just out of curiosity, where do you think employees come from?
Let's say that you, the Government, want to hire someone with 15 years of experience... You have one of a few options:
1 - Hire from within Government ("Do you think that appointing another bureaucrat to fix the other bureaucrats will work?")
2 - Hire from academia ("Those who can't do, teach. This person knows nothing about the way the Real World (tm) works.")
3 - Hire from industry ("...and the revolving door of Government is complete, allowing industrial people to run the country.")
I don't suppose a thought similar to "Someone from one of the largest web-based software groups in the nation will likely contribute positively towards the Governments' new web-based initiative" would be appropriate...
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Saturday August 16 2014, @12:58AM
Man, I'm just being jaded and snarky. I don't have any reasonable answers to your question of where to hire from, because it's built upon the premise that we're working within in this fucked up dystopia run by a federal government and a bunch of corporate symbiotes. I have some ideas about how to fix that, but nobody wants to hear them. So I'm going to continue being jaded and snarky, and criticizing the system that exists.
Also, it's fair to note the the Google guy wasn't hired to regulate his own industry, unlike some other riders of the revolving door. [wikipedia.org] That doesn't mean I like it, there are other problems surrounding the issue, but it's certainly not the clearest case of abuse out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @04:39PM
They're replacing all the HP Pavilion Pentium 200mhz mmx pc's running win95 with Dell dual core refurbs running win98 at a cost of $3.8 million per computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by present_arms on Tuesday August 12 2014, @05:24PM
Not 98, but NT 3.51
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 3, Funny) by paulej72 on Tuesday August 12 2014, @06:14PM
And the real cost comes from back porting IE 6 to that platform.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 3, Informative) by present_arms on Tuesday August 12 2014, @06:47PM
It'll be in the updates soon, around August next year they have to deploy NT4, poor bastards
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @06:18PM
And what about Windows for Workgroups?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12 2014, @10:14PM
No 3.5 Floppy drives, they do have 5.25 Floppy drives though!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday August 12 2014, @06:41PM
Aha.. now you must all upgrade to latest browser instable version with whistles and bells that suck your CPU clean from any performance and allows you to be remotely r00ted. So that you can type some simple text message..
(be sure NSA has some "extensions" builtin)
The latest web trends seems just to complicate the http+html rather than actually accomplish anything more useful than was before.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday August 12 2014, @07:12PM
And you thought $600 million for a website was a lot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 13 2014, @04:22AM
Every government would benefit from a massive overhaul of its technology. Most of the detractors in the thread so far, however, are quite right that this initiative will go nowhere.
It seems to me a better way to make meaningful progress toward this goal would be to open source the source code of the bureaucracy. 100% transparency about the technologies and data structures the various departments use, and what hand-offs connect them to others. That would already attract the civic hacker crowd to produce meaningful apps to make government work better. If you slap an X prize on top of that, you'll get not only the civic hackers, who mostly want to do good but also wouldn't mind winning some money, but also the hackers who mostly code for money but also wouldn't mind doing some good.
That's how you avoid the traps of hiring corporate stooges, academics who know nothing about how the world works, or bureaucrats for whom the answer to every problem is more bureaucracy.
Washington DC delenda est.