Article 22. Why Government Screws-up Almost Everything it Touches

Government is focused on getting the funding to do something, seldom on where to spend the funding to get the most bang for its bucks.  One key area which stands out is in the State and Federal governments continuing failures in IT implementations.  For example the recent failure of the Health Care website can best be blamed on bungling bureaucrats.  With the inability to recognize their short comings they continue to make bad choices hiring the wrong people using the wrong hardware and software approach wasting $billions.
 
The problem in past years and to some extent today is that there are few government leaders who have the knowledge to make the proper decisions related to IT implementations.  The result is that they most always relay on their own IT personnel to make the decisions on future implementations.  These are the vary people one should not ask because these are the people who have spent years working on their obsolete hardware.  95% of all government IT programs are obsolete but even worse government continues to build or add to the present obsolete systems using the same obsolete software approach.

Most government systems use an obsolete IBM Base Systems Application from which all other application programs must be compatible.  These government systems have never been up graded and are more than 50 years old.  Most of these systems were coded before the present Systems Analysts were born.  This is the same function as Microsoft’s Windows 7 where all application  programs must be compatible with it but it gets periodically up graded to Windows 8 etc..  With cell phones becoming obsolete within a year, one can only begin to see the inefficiency of these obsolete systems. 

Washington State is one of the few states who has come to grips with this IT problem.  A few years ago while planning for the new IT facility at Olympia Washington.  The then IT State Manager was planning on reinstalling the current obsolete application programs into the new facility.  Fortunately a computer knowledgeable Congressman got wind of the scheme and persuaded the Governor to implement modern Relational Databases into the new facility using the SQL language.  Unfortunately  it was too late for failed systems installed in: Indiana, Virginia, Texas and others.  The Indiana and Texas failures were catastrophic yet they were able to spend enough money to make the systems work.  But the biggest failure was in Virginia where nearly a $billion was spent just for the develop a statewide email system which they could have had for next to nothing using Googles Gmail.