More on FBI Computers

George Buddy of Buddy's Bemusings alerts me to this article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek critical of the FBI's computer efforts, which raises some additional thoughts:

• No good liberal is surprised that a government contractor is in it for the money. When I was a government bureaucrat I always thought I could do a better job than the contractors, but then I always was a know-it-all. One of the problems with contractors is that they are basically used-car salesmen, by which I mean that they're con-men and women. More seriously, there's the same imbalance of information as the economist Akerlof famously identified with used cars and won the Nobel Prize for. The seller (the contractor) knows more about its capabilities and software than does the buyer (the government).
  
• Having said all that, I don't buy the Alter's idea that the FBI's system is so simple that 12 contractors could have done it. It may look simple to us outsiders, but not to insiders.
  
• But given the environment, Freeh should have hired a contractor to devote 12 man-years to the job of building a kernel system, that could have expanded and evolved as the FBI started to learn the capabilities of PC's and the Internet and the process of developing software and as software has changed over the last 15 years. Trying to do a big system all at once was asking for trouble. (NASA got us to the moon, but on an evolutionary path of development.)

I give Alter credit for citing Harshaw's rule one (without the credit): "If you’ve read even one of the 500,000 articles in the popular press about software development, it’s obvious that the first try never works."