Americas New CIO Wants To Disrupt Government and Make It a Startup 287
An anonymous reader writes "America's new CIO Steven VanRoekel wants to revamp the federal government and make it as agile as a startup. But first he has to get rid of bugs like the Department of Agriculture's 21 different e-mail systems. From the article: '“Too often, we have built closed, monolithic projects that are outdated or no longer needed by the time they launch,” he said. As an example, he mentioned the Defense Department’s human resources management system. Dubbed the “Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System,” the project was meant to take seven years to develop. Instead, it took 10, cost $850 million and had to be scrapped after 10 years of development in 2010 because it ended up being useless.'"
Re:Gov doesn't know how to manage contracts (Score:5, Informative)
Let's say I go to Procter&Gamble, and offer them an HR system. I say to them, it will cost $30 million and 3 years. Then after 3 years, I try to bill them $40 million and say it will take another 2 years to deliver.
I'm pretty sure that's when either:
1) PG sues me for breach of contract, and refuses to pay anything
You've obviously never managed a large implementation - cost overruns always happen. Vendors oversell the capabilities of the project and companies underestimate their needs. It's not until the project gets underway that the business realizes that the HR plan they spec'ed out at the beginning won't work anymore because it can't accommodate the needs of their new Asian division. So, the project drags on and the vendor keeps billing (justified by the change orders that the company initiated).
It's not all the fault of the software vendor, it's just that large, complex software deployments are large and complex and it's impossible to spec everything out at the beginning... and even if you could, the needs of the business can change in the 3 years it takes to implement the project.