

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends - Reltair
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/romney-campaign-got-its-it-from-best-buy-staples-and-friends/

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ig1
This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing
desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It
tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article
carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism.

It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as
desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you
can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard.

There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an
ineffective team, but this isn't it.

~~~
mjg59
From the article:

"even internal projects like Orca were dependent on quick fixes from outside
talent"

I don't see anywhere that it implies that Orca was built by Best Buy.

~~~
ig1
The whole article ends with a paragraph on Orca, implying the issues discussed
above were the cause of Orca. As I said a careful reading will indicate that
they were completely unrelated, but the article is written in such a way that
many people will conclude from the article that they are related.

Look at the other comments people have made about the article, how many are
from people who think the article is about operational IT and how many think
it's about strategically important custom software ?

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dekayed
The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a
profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a
competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations
and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal
of the campaign.

Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this
article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney
campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished.
Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something
like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?

~~~
saraid216
I'm guessing that the party organization itself isn't allowed to do anything
other than nominate their candidate. The campaign, of which the GOTV system is
a part, has to be directed by the candidate. This makes sense in that you're
technically electing a person, not a party.

~~~
Evbn
Sure, but the party could contract with a consulting group, which could take
on the winner as a client.

It is all the same people circulating between the parties and the campaigns
and the consultancies and the PACs.

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phillmv
I quite liked the profile of @harper in The Atlantic the other day, even if it
was a little too fawning.

To me the lesson to be drawn from these articles is that the Obama campaign
saw their IT infrastructure as a 'core business unit' and vertically
integrated it, whereas the Romney campaign treated it like any other commodity
service.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-
the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/?single_page=true)

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shrikant
Um.

 _At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them
well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008,
returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of
tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to
Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going
to his financial compliance software company._

This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

~~~
pavel_lishin
On the other hand, who doesn't think that their own company is the best for
any given job?

~~~
Evbn
That is why the leader's job is to critically assess conflicts of interests in
subordinates.

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mrkmcknz
With all the talk of this being a big data driven election I was surprised to
not see Palantir utilised by either party.

If I was running for office I would be giving those guys a call.

~~~
Evbn
Companies that milk the government all four years try to avoid the partisan
fray during elections. There is a parallel industry dedicated to campaigns.

Any defense contractor that accepts employment by a campaign should be guilty
for mutiny and treason.

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forensic
Wow, he ran his campaign like the ran the companies he destroyed/raided.

You have to wonder how this incompetence translated into electoral failure.
Maybe a better businessman would have given Obama a challenge.

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pavel_lishin
> In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be
> a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work.

I wonder how many hours that actually ended up being. $12,000 for six months
seems like a pittance, but if his job involved showing up on Sunday afternoons
and making sure that security patches had been installed Saturday night, that
doesn't seem like a bad bargain.

~~~
GabrielF00
I suspect it was a massive workload that came with the benefit of working for
something that you believe in and developing contacts at the highest levels.
Political campaigns tend to work young people very hard for very little money
with the expectation that you're gaining invaluable experience.

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stcredzero
_> Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy
for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in
spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from
old friends._

This is a decent way of having a lot of small groups doing their own thing.
It's a terrible way to coordinate an organization as a whole to accomplish a
specific goal.

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mikeash
This is probably unfair and biased, but what the heck.

If this whole story is true, it seems crazy that this man nearly became
president. He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was
trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way.

Anybody knowledgeable in IT should have been able to tell him that this
approach was a bad idea. I mean, Best Buy's consulting subsidiary? They
probably thought Best Buy was a cool place that was "with it" when it came to
tech. How clueless can you get?

It sure sounds like the Romney campaign's IT was run on "connections" and
ideology rather than sound technology. This was probably a good way to run a
campaign a few decades ago, but doesn't seem to work as well today.

It will be interesting to see how this stuff evolves, anyway. The US
presidential campaign cycle is so slow relative to the technology sector that
it seems hard to apply lessons from previous elections. The current smartphone
revolution was just getting off the ground in 2008, so there wasn't much
experience to draw on for 2012. By the time 2016 rolls around, will 2012's
experience be similarly obsolete?

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reitzensteinm
This seems like confirmation bias, mixed with a healthy dose of overestimating
the importance of your profession.

If a similar story came out about Obama's campaign, would you have really
written that it's _crazy_ that he got elected?

I'm not a Romney fan, and I think this story should be embarrassing for him,
but let's not get carried away. Running a software project (even if not
directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential
candidate at your peril.

~~~
james-skemp
I don't think he was focusing on the software aspect, as much as the business
aspect.

Again, I might be bias, but I agree with him, and if Obama had the same mess
of where money was going to, I'd be disappointed. This doesn't read like a
leader/manager controlling where time and money is spent, but rather a bunch
of people going their own route and buying whatever servers their needs.

As a developer, I'd definitely like the latter route. But after time you come
to realize that management stepping in and focusing direction is what's really
best in the long term.

And if you can't do it yourself, you delegate to someone who can.

In short, this looks like what happens when the workers are running the show,
instead of working together under a single driving force.

~~~
mikeash
> I don't think he was focusing on the software aspect, as much as the
> business aspect.

You're exactly right. We don't really know much of the software side anyway,
aside from little details like that it was not adequately tested. I'd be
thinking the same thing if a similar failure had happened in any area of
Romney's campaign, it just so happens that software failure is 1) what
happened and 2) is what gets discussed on HN.

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ricardobeat
Interesting: apparently they paid only $790 for Basecamp, while spending >$1k
on Dropbox, >$4k on optimizely/new relic, $20k on salesforce, $1.9k on
resumator (?), >$16k on other unknown analytics. Looks like 37signals is
severely underpricing it's products (and even then they make tons of money).

~~~
mgkimsal
They might have gotten it early on though not used it as extensively as they'd
planned on using it, but kept paying for it. Just because they'd paid basecamp
doesn't mean it was necessarily something that was vitally used at the center
of the campaign.

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dkhenry
sound like there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get an inside
position on the next Administration in four years. I bet you could put
together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six
months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell
to.

~~~
incision
>I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure
in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would
be able to sell to.

I don't know if I'd make that bet.

Without the right connections I expect you stand little/no chance of getting
an audience to have your plan heard and even if you do there will be backers
expecting to be handed such work along with half a dozen bigger names claiming
to be able to provide identical service.

I'm sure if Nate Silver wants to start a political IT consultancy someone will
pay attention to him, but without that kind of demonstrated value - that can
only really be demonstrated during an election - I don't see how even the best
plan gets any visibility.

It's an interesting idea for sure though.

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philip1209
The 37Signals allotment was high - did they manage the whole campaign in
Basecamp?

~~~
Evbn
Wow, that is the first ever known (to the general public case) of a 37s
customer. Not a great press hit. And for a Chicago company! That is Obama
territory.

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rorrr
Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life.
Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on
average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.

~~~
sokoloff
It appears to me like you're taking the total outsource IT spending and
dividing it by the total number of people on the Romney campaign payroll. Of
course that yields a non-sensical answer.

~~~
rorrr
510 people seems a bit low for the whole campaign, but assuming you're
correct, 1 mil is still a ridiculously small amount of money for such a
serious campaign. We're basically talking the position for the most powerful
man in the world.

