US wastes billions on rubbish IT
400 poorly planned projects panned
US GOVERNMENT auditors at the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, have released a study (pdf) identifying more than 400 federal IT projects worth about $25 billion as poorly planned or underperforming.
Though primly worded, that's auditor-speak for blowing the money and screwing the pooch.
Senator Tom Carper (D-Delaware) is concerned that federal agencies are spending billions on IT projects that are redundant, lack clear objectives and are managed by incompetents, he suggested yesterday. Citing the GAO findings, he said it might be time for Congress to scrap some of those projects.
He also noted that, unfortunately, federal agencies have been consistently failing to provide Congress with adequate information about their IT projects to enable it to perform effective oversight. Even worse, almost 50 per cent of federal IT investments are hiding their project debacles from Congress, 'rebaselining' projects – sometimes repeatedly – to cover up cost overruns and mask schedule slippages.
Senator Carper, with fellow Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, will introduce the Technology Investment and Waste Prevention Act of 2008 this week to give Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) better information about federal IT projects. The bill would require agencies to report regularly on significant deviations in cost, schedule and performance.
It is not reported whether that proposed legislation will have any real teeth. Congress has required federal agencies to keep IT project costs, schedules and achievement of objectives within 90 per cent of plans since 1994. The OMB has been responsible for giving Congress a mandatory annual report on the agencies' IT projects, but it has produced only three of those reports in the last 14 years. Congress has so far failed to do anything about that.
Zero-based budgeting of government IT projects, where all federal agencies are required to produce audited reports on projects' progress annually to retain their funding, might help.
But then, what's a mere $25 billion out of the US Congressional pork barrel, much of which goes straight into the pockets of campaign-contributing IT project-outsourcing contractors within the US military / industrial complex, compared against the approximately $25 billion that the US government wastes in Iraq and Afghanistan each and every month? µ
L'Inq
Eweek
Comments
90% is Catcher.
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drashek
wasted in Iraq?
Your right freedom should be free. But it's not! We should have let Vietnam, Korea, Afganistan, Kuwait Iraq fall. No, I don't think so! While I'm thinking about it why did we even enter WW I and WW II. -All it takes for evil to pravail is for a good man to do nothing-God bless America and those who protect it and the freedoms in and of this world.
Meh.
Iraq may or may not be a waste, but Afghanistan certainly isn't. Unless you meant to imply that the US should have just set off a couple Trident submarines' worth of thermonuclear bombs and blasted that wasteland flat. In which case, I agree: nukes are far cheaper.isn't a bureaucrat incompetent by definition
Anyone who goes to make a career living of the tax tit is incompetent to begin with - otherwise they'd work in the private sector and not be part of the growing problem of bigger gov't.In that context, it's not surprising IT projects aren't scoped, managed and implemented properly, cause if they had the skills to do that successfully, they wouldn't be leaches on society by working for gov't now would they!?
Aging and non insterested governments
Hopefully Obama will be the next President. He has already a clear track record of understanding IT and especially the Internet and throughout his campaign he has talked a lot of the importance of using IT and the Internet correct.Until now very few countries have governments that really understand the modern IT world. Not very seldom we even hear government officials, all over the world, almost joking about that they don't really use or understand computers.
With Obama in charge I am convinced he will rapidly change the way governments use IT and it will lead the way for the rest of the world to follow.
fudge packers
This is only because of the homosexuals that run the democratic party.I spit on your puny $25 billion
Time was when $25 billion would have been a tidy sum - before the ravages of inflation took hold. Nowadays the saying needs to be revised: "A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there; pretty soon you're talking real money".Hang on there a mo
If its anything like the UK then these projects are meticulously planned.Planned to fail, planned to squeeze as much taxpayers money for the companies involved.
Thats what happens when you get private companies involved in goverment. The companies responsibility is to make as much profit for their shareholders as possible.
It only saves money in peoples dreams.
"wasted in Iraq"
Seriously? "wasted in Iraq"? Just like Afghanistan, Kuwait, Korea, Vietnam, etc. we are the ones going to work to save people and protect their freedoms while everybody else sits around. How about those two little wars America got involved in to save our European asses? How about "World War I" and "World War II"?I can't believe the author thinks this money is "wasted" because we are bringing freedoms to people who can't help themselves. Wow. I'm fed up with all the anti-American crap on INQ.