Agreed Alison and Geoff.  To your new example and great point, Geoff, what you are unveiling is the total lack of accountability.  What we see in these examples are people filling these roles without accountability, and certainly not leadership.  No wonder we have a national debt.  It seems that when government is involved, we no longer expect efficiency and effectiveness.

DHagar

@DHagar: Another issue is the "Why don't we wait to implement this until after the next election, when conditions are more favorable?" mindset. Wouldn't want to create a huge hairy mess that could be political fodder in the midterms-- or sink the boss's re-election campaign. 

The notion that there will always be an election in two years never quite sinks in. Or, if it does, there's the temptation to leave the bag of snakes for your successor.

Of course, the private sector isn't immune to this. A lot of hospitals and HMOs dragged their feet on implementing electronic health records. The theory was "Why spend a ton of money and make our lives impossible trying to implement Obamacare when it'll get repealed if the Republicans win in 2012?"

Now you have a bunch of folks scrambling to meet 2013 and 2014 deadlines, hollering about needing more time.

Yes, that is true -- it must be tough to plan ahead and decide on a long-term strategy when the top gun will leave in four/eight years and could bring with him/her (please, one day!) a 180-degree change in strategy. 

Fascinating perspective, Goeff.  You are absolutely correct, and that constant turnover, with perpetual caretakers, may be part of the problem that Alison points out.

Those facts, along with the overall lack of transparency in accountability, provides a perfect storm for wasted efforts and restricting purchases to comfortable alliances that keep things the same.

DHagar

Reminds me of an amusing tweet by @DevOps_Borat:

Word "impossible" is not exist in devops vocabulary. Instead we are use "done by Q4".

@Alison: The problem can be fixed and it should be. The biggest obstacle, I think, is the frequent turnover at the top.

A lot of private sector companies don't know how many servers they have and what they all do... and they don't document well. But at least they don't have regime change every four or eight years.

@Kim: At some point, people simply run out of energy to fight a particular battle. Facebook has figured this out. Keep changing the settings, so people have to hunt to protect themselves-- keep rolling stuff back incrementally. At some point, you have a job or kids or dandurff to worry about. 

Plus, in politicis, there's always the "We didn't promise you it would be easy to fix this..." defense. How do you decide if the problem is really hard to fix, or if the people fixing it need mroe help... or if they're simnply incompetent... or just not trying?

Good points, Geoff, and I suspect there's a general assumption that a significant amount of money will be wasted which makes the electorate passive about things like this.

It's easy to be cynical about government's preference for sticking with the old boy network and a laissez faire attitude toward doing business, but I would argue that it's trying to shake things up within its datacenters by adopting cloud and consolidating many datacenters. Based on the MeriTalk report (and other data out there), one way federal IT execs can almost immediately improve efficiency and cut costs is by simply expanding the number of vendors they work with (although, granted, this study was funded by a vendor that would potentially benefit in this scenario). You can argue the same holds true in some private companies, as well, although industry has the advantage of being able to reward successful CIOs and IT pros with bonuses, profit-sharing, and other incentives not necessarily available to federal employees.

Now the feds are placing so much emphasis on cost-cutting and efficiency within their datacenters and are publicizing the succeses of various departments' initiatives, I think we'll see more of these practices across various agencies and states.

@Kim Davis: No, I'm not suggesting that this is right or that people shouldn't want it changed. I was merely addressing a point that is often overlooked: The system might be working precisely as designed.

Governmsnts tend to be very slow-moving, and frequently the programs focus on the wrong objectives or try to solve problems in a roundabout way. But mechanisms to spend money are almost always carefully thought out.. 

If you're auditing such a system, it's foolish to assume that people don't realize what's going on.  You're likely to reach the truth much sooner if you assume there is a rational explanation for its behavior.

Then, as Hal Holbrook says to Robert Redford, "Follow the money."