Government IT planning and acquisition are totally broken

I recently posted a 7-point list of recommended Obama Administration IT priorities, and have generally held forth on the need for a true United States Chief Information Officer (CIO). But truth be told, that all boils down to "Solve our terrible problems with government IT," and those problems really boil down to one thing:

Government IT planning and acquisition are totally broken.

The government plans and acquires IT the way it makes most large capital expenditures. It creates thick planning documents, then goes through a long, formal bidding process, governed by rigid rules. And then, when it's all over, one of the losers notices a procedural violation, and the whole bid is done all over again.

This is the opposite of agility. It is also the opposite of common sense. It amounts to buying huge custom systems, designed by waterfall methodologies, with little room for mid-course corrections, and few mechanisms for assuring interoperability. It at once much too coarse-grained and somewhat too fine-grained. It is a continuation of practices that the private sector has long abandoned, for overwhelming cause.

In short, it's madness.

How can it be fixed, you ask? Well, how about the same way the private sector has. Key private sector techniques for taming the IT jungle include:

• Consolidation where it makes sense.
• Small, agile projects where the issues are routine, but consolidation doesn't make sense.
• Modular, tiered systems architectures for the consolidated part, and for as much of the unconsolidated part as makes sense.
• Hiring the best and the brightest for big one-off projects, when those are really necessary or advisable.

How many accounting, budgeting, human resources, or purchasing systems does the Federal Government need?? Many fewer than it has. The same could be said about generic database, BI, and other kinds of system software. Many smaller systems (e.g., department-specific public-facing sites) absolutely need to be custom-developed, but a lot of big stuff should be simplified just as private sector systems are.

There also are some very large systems that need to be custom-developed, starting with air traffic control and the software part of Al Gore's wise recommended new electricity grid. Fine. But when the private sector builds systems anywhere near that scale, it does so incrementally, revising plans as needed after each piece is in place. The government needs to do the same thing. If that's currently illegal (which it isn't) -- or hopelessly impractical (which it is) -- then the laws need to be changed to make it possible and practical, according to two principles:

• Give Federal IT managers the same flexibility and discretion private sector ones have.
• Wrap as much central oversight around that as seems advisable or necessary.

Save the pork barrel politics for other, slower-moving areas.

• Data Center
• Software