More “Running Government Like A Business” Efficiency
David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers has the details: Gadget’s failure could triple cost of 2010 census
WASHINGTON — The 2010 census is already in trouble.
The hand-held mobile computers that are supposed to replace the pens and paper long used by census takers aren’t working properly, and delays could send the cost from $600 million to as much as $2 billion.
The Census Bureau has done little, if any, planning for what to do if the handheld mobile computers can’t be made to work. As a result, an important census dress rehearsal this spring has been delayed by a month as the agency looks for backup plans.
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The government awarded a $600 million contract for the new system to the Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., in 2006. But the Census Bureau continued to tinker with the specifications, which the GAO said led to delays and cost overruns. The agency didn’t finalize the specifications until January.
Now the “rough estimate” for the revised contract could be as high as $2 billion, according to what Census officials have told Congress, the GAO said.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this week that the program has “serious problems.” Both the Census Bureau and Harris “could have done things differently and better over the past couple of years,” he said.
This is why I refuse to bid on, or to be part of the bid of others on government contracts: they never spend the time and money up front to determine what they want and need. If you are a small business, you get screwed doing things that weren’t covered by the contract. If you are a corporation, you low bid the original work and make obscene profits on the change orders.
This application can be accomplished with a standard laptop and GPS receiver with a minimum of programming. There are very similar systems already in use by a variety of industries. I seem to remember Hipparchia of Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks talking about implementing a comparable system several months ago and GIS is being used by governments at all levels. These people could accomplish the same thing with off-the-shelf hardware and some software tweaking, but they have contracted out for a single purpose piece of hardware that will be useless for anything else after the census is done.
4 comments
When I worked for the Census Bureau in 1995, we used a standard laptop with a dBase application running on it when we did our field interviews. It worked quite well, actually, considering it was running DOS 6.2 and a non-GUI environment. It was kinda funny though, I was bashing my way through the piney woods of north Louisiana and you’d see me sitting on the front porch of some old black sharecropper’s shack on a ratty old couch with that laptop perched on my knees, talking to some feller who was older than dirt. It was like the 21st century met the 19th century, whoa!
But that was back during the Clinton years, when government actually worked. Now, I don’t expect the Census Bureau to dust off that old dBase application, but point is, we were doing it during the Clinton Administration when the technology was only barely there to do it, and with today’s technology it ought to be much easier. Well, it would be, anyhow, if the Bush administration was competent to pour piss out of a boot…
— Badtux the Snarky Penguin
You have a laptop and a GPS, what else to you need?
There was a mention of connections – how about they wait until they get to a Starbucks and use the WiFi, after storing it in an encrypted form on the hard drive? There is no broadband in a whole lot of the country, hell, there isn’t even cell phone coverage where these people will probably be working, so what’s the issue?
I have a vision of these people wondering around with a Crackberry burning out their thumbs. It’s not as if we all have our guv’ment issued bar codes or microchips yet.
Back in the mid-Eighties, as a subcontractor, I did a great deal of the design and coding of the USDA’s food intake and food frequency analysis software. Yeah, it was all DOS-based, with some version of CodeBase as the dBase engine. The sucker worked, and it went on to become the basis of food intake s/w for the U.S. Army and the governments of Australia and Egypt (Egypt??? Egypt!) … a lot of which I also coded. (Full credit to the lead programmer, a woman who was one of the best-organized supervisors I ever worked for, and a decent programmer to boot.)
Sometimes I cry when I think about the bargain the guv’mint got from me in the design and coding of that s/w. I am not complaining; these projects were my livelihood in my first few years as a contractor… but the numbers were in tens of thousands of dollars, not millions.
There is no intrinsic reason that government work has to be mired in overruns and bad jobs needing a re-do… but there are most certainly bureaucrats who are not very good at planning and anticipating the actual requirements for the software.
Oh, by the way… everything we did was with off-the-shelf hardware, and off-the-shelf software libraries, with a lot of connective tissue written (as was everything back then) in C. It was novel for nutrition software, but no ground was broken in the methods or tools we used to produce it. Why can this not be the case with s/w development for more government projects?
Until they can reform the process and make it possible for the “little guys” who are more interested in solving problems than corporate profits to get involved in these projects nothing will change. The first thing is to start punishing people for cost overruns, rather than approving them as a matter of course. There’s nothing worse than putting in an honest bid, being underbid by a corporation, and then seeing the final cost well over your bid.
The government deals almost exclusively with a few corporations and it costs the taxpayers billions of dollars.