
Dear Bureaucrat, how can I work with agency’s useless computer system? - David_Reed
https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureaucrat-how-can-i-work-with-and-around-my-agencys-useless-computer-system/
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perfunctory
This problem is not confined to the government. I've worked in more than a
dozen different enterprises, big and small. I think it wouldn't be an
overstatement to say that the majority of computer systems I've come across
are pretty useless.

EDIT: Maybe enterprises should embrace systems like coda.io as a reasonable
compromise between rigid enterprise systems and spreadsheets.

~~~
reallydontask
Since your statement is based on personal experience I cannot comment, I would
say, though, that the majority of enterprise systems I've used are far from
useless. Most of them have been: bloated, slow, outdated and complicated but
that's a far cry from being useless.

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officemonkey
As a government bureaucrat, I'm constantly amazed at the number of systems
bought and paid for that essentially recreate functionality that is already
built into the enterprise sharepoint.

We can't find money for an in-house sharepoint programmer but we have seven
figures to build something in salesforce from scratch.

~~~
jermaustin1
I'm not in the public sector, but I've seen this a lot in the enterprise
world.

That is the problem with how organizations prioritize capex over opex in their
budgeting. Most teams I've worked for can request a bigger capex budget for a
project because it is "one time". Even though they ask for a bigger budget
every year.

But asking for more annual opex is a harder sell on the bean counters, because
the increase of operating expense of a department is seen as a permanent
thing. It only goes up, never down, so lets just not give them money for it.

~~~
perfunctory
This. Also capex and opex have different effect on taxes, since the government
usually wants to stimulate innovation (subsidize capex).

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hirundo
> I’ve talked to IT about matching the system to what we actually need to do,
> but they say the development contract ended years ago

From the dev perspective this is the problem. There are few workflows that can
be described to the developer, who then develops it and throws it over a wall,
and it's successful. All of the successful project's I've been part of have
been iterative.

Best is when I'm an actual user of a system I'm developing, eating my own dog
food as I go, being the user who is feeling the pain. That was the case for
much of my career.

Next best is having to handle the user tickets for the system you wrote, which
is what I frequently do now. Every ticket is an opportunity to patch and fix
and refactor to remove the need for the next such ticket.

I don't think I've ever written a non-trivial program, however thoroughly
planned and specified, that was fit to purpose before it was used, and
heavily.

Development contracts should be written with this in mind. They either need to
extend well into the "post development" phase, or include staffing or training
as needed to continue development far past release if not for the life of the
software.

~~~
David_Reed
Yes, but by the time the system is implemented, the official whose pet project
it was had moved on. The new official wants to channel resources to his own
pet project, not making the old one work.

~~~
danaris
Or, alternatively: When the system is originally contracted, the bean counters
refuse to permit any budget for any development beyond the initial creation.

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reaperducer
_The fix is that workers create our own solutions to do what the official
system doesn’t... IT departments call this “shadow IT”_

And now I have a name for about 50% of what I do each day.

~~~
SapporoChris
I worked two maybe three years doing just this. Hired into a non-IT
department, tasked with others to script/automate the in-house ERP (Enterprise
Resource Planning) system. We were able to increase the productivity of the
department, tasks taking two weeks turning to an hour or less. However,
honestly it was a house of cards because the automation we created could fail
when the IT department changed the ERP system significantly.

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js8
Yesterday, there was a discussion
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20174418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20174418))
about most OSS being so underfinanced that the authors must be doing it
because they are either very kind or very crazy.

I was reminded of the David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, where he describes the
testimony of a programmer, who is working on OSS in free time so that he could
then cover it with duct tape during the day to make a living. That part of the
essay just seemed very apt.

Here, another parts of that essay seem also apt, those about how useless jobs
get created in a bureaucracy.

Is there something fundamental to these things, that we don't know how to deal
with?

Is it worse is better at play? That people are so damn good at adaptive
innovation, that they will rather adapt than to address the root problem?

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brodouevencode
I think the root of the problem is in the title: _Bureaucrat_.

Bureaucrats have no incentive, profit motive, or real tests of competence. In
private industry they must perform now or find another job. If a Bureaucrat
doesn't perform there are remediation plans that take years to execute. Even
then there's no guarantee that the same standard will exist at the end as did
the beginning. The Bureaucrat is just a warm body filling a seat.

Source: nearly ten years working in the government. I finally wised up.
Working in the government nearly turned me into an anarchist. If this offends
anyone I'm sorry, and I know a lot of this resentment is from living that
jaded life. But I do encourage you to look elsewhere. There are greener
pastures.

~~~
perl4ever
My conception of what the government does that is worthwhile, in the abstract,
is that it lowers transaction costs, enabling free markets to function a la
Ronald Coase's theorem. This is what the private sector is always fighting,
what requires regulation. It's like entropy. This is ultimately what makes a
modern civilization different from a stone age one.

So measuring productivity in the usual manner and comparing it with the
private sector is a non sequitur to me. The benefits aren't booked as revenue
or profit.

~~~
brodouevencode
Fair enough - if it's done well and with competence. My experience was nearly
the exact opposite. In terms of 80-20 it was really on 20% of the people doing
_any_ of the work.

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adolph
_There are review and approval steps that my agency requires, but aren’t part
of the workflow in the system, so I have to remember who needs to see what,
whether they’ve responded, etc._

The VA has a solution for you:

[https://github.com/department-of-veterans-
affairs/caseflow](https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow)

~~~
David_Reed
The question is whether the workflow the developers are being told to
implement is what the workers actually need to do to get the work done. Also,
will there be an ongoing mechanism to revise the software as the work
requirements change? In most cases, the answer to both questions is no.

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thomasfedb
The power of Excel to pull off complicated administrative tasks, and to
destroy souls, is tremendous.

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loukrazy
At IBM we used Lotus Notes as our shadow IT. Lotus Notes databases are just
really ambitious excel spreadsheets and most of ours were written by self
empowered excel hackers. It was kind of beautiful but as you might expect, a
pain in the ass to maintain.

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m_fayer
This column, both in concept and in content, is pure gold.

~~~
David_Reed
Thanks.

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rplst8
The most illuminating thing about this is that the system that doesn't work
for them is about filling/responding to FOIA requests.

