The Paperless Office

I remember when IRMD (IT types) was promising the System/36 would mean the paperless office. That didn't work out. But we may be working towards the newspaperless society, given the shutdown of this paper company's last newsprint machine.

COBOL Is Hack Proof

That's the official conclusion of a House committee, at least its head.  So old no one understands it enough to hack it.

No EEO on USDA Investments?

Here's the USDA's list of major investment areas for IT, reached from the performance.gov site.  Don't I recall that Vilsack was supposedly redoing the culture of the Department, and hasn't his Assistant Secretary for EEO (not the correct title, but I'm too lazy at the moment to check) responded to OIG/GAO with proposals for better systems in the EEO area?

Where does that appear in the list?  Is Vilsack really putting money where his mouth is?

[Damn, as I age I'm getting more cranky.]

I Don't Understand: FSA Versus NRCS

I was solemnly assured by a number of people (all ASCS/FSA employees) that the SCS/NRCS conservationists spent all their time riding around in their pickup trucks and never could be found in the office.   And ASCS employees never lie.  So what's with this Federal Computer Week article on the NRCS "streamlining plan" which reports:

Currently, the USDA field conservationists report spending as little as 20 to 40 percent of their time in the field working with customers

The expected outcome of the initiative is for field staff to be able to spend up to 75 percent of their time in the field with customers, the plan said.

The initiative will free up the equivalent of an additional 1,200 to 1,500 field technical staff that will be redirected back into customer contact, the USDA said in its plan.

  Here's the plan which is only 5 months old (only the latest news on this blog). It's actually part of the USDA plan.  Funny, though, it sounds basically like the vision which Kevin Wickey and other NRCS people were trying to implement back in the Glickman days.  Which as I understood it, was putting everything on a laptop which a conservationist would need in the field.

Interface Problems in Farming

A reminder of how far farming has come since my dad's problem was hooking up the new tractor to the old horse-drawn mower:  From John Phipps, excusing his slow blogging, emphasis added:

Multiple issues here on the farm, inclding working to get a rural water district started, speeches. field work, and the now-incredible complexity of hooking a green planter with a red tractor and third-party electronics. No excuse, but posting came in last.

The End of the IBM Card?

Back before I retired Treasury was starting to move us all off printed paychecks to direct deposit.  This process is finally ending, with moving everyone off printed checks.  Back in the day, one's paycheck (and savings bonds, which are also all electronic now) were actually printed on IBM punch cards, so the data punched into the card matched the printed data (payee and amount, etc.) on the check.

I wonder whether Treasury's remaining paper checks are still printed on IBM cards?  Probably not, they probably used bar-coded checks these days.

[Updated:  no more IBM cards, here's the image--looks like the data is all encoded]

Government Contracting

For many years I lived blissfully without having any dealings with government contractors. Basically ASCS was, at least as far as I knew, all its work using its own employees.  So it was an eye-opener in the late 80's when I started to run into government contracting, partly on the System/36 replacement project and a bit later on the Info Share project.

At least in my memory, the contractors were uniformly 8a firms, meaning their ownership was minority, women, disabled, with bigger outfits like Boeing and SAIC as their subcontractors. That seems to have continued with recent FSA projects.

Here's a govloop post from a disgruntled subcontractor (no relationship to USDA) which gives another side of the picture.  Essentially the story is that the prime contractor systematically screwed the sub.  Don't know whether it's true or not, don't know whether the government agency was satisfied with the performance under the contract, but it sure doesn't increase my faith in the use of contractors.

Bureaucrats: Ho Hum, the New Faces Leave

A reason federal bureaucrats in many agencies react with a certain reserve to the bright shiny new ideas of the bright shiny new bosses appointed by a bright shiny new President (I'm thinking of GWB, who did you I think I was thinking of ) is they know the boss won't be around long.  A couple years and gone.  See this Federal Computer Weekly piece on Vivek Kundra, the departing CIO.  (Also this piece from Ohmygov and this from OMBwatch)

[Updated:  see this Kelman post on the same subject:

Making major management reforms in government takes time. Ironically, one problem is that such reforms are often not partisan. That sounds good, but it means that when new political appointees rush to eliminate what the previous politicals have done, it just creates "flavor-of-the-month" cynicism among career employees and diminishes the willingness of the career folks to work on any management improvement initiatives politicals promote.

Though I didn't mention it in the previous blog, I remember my annoyance when the Bush folks arrived in 2001 that  within days they dismantled any mention or trace of the Clinton/Gore administration's "reinventing government" effort. It was, so to speak, bush league.]

USDA's IT Reforms

Described here at the CIO  blog.  Everyone is moving to the cloud for email and collaboration?

Sad Sentence of the Day: the Replaceable Kevin Drum

From a post on the advance of computer intelligence in replacing people, Kevin writes:

In the meantime, I just hope that Mother Jones doesn't figure out that they could almost certainly find some extremely bright, knowledgable, plugged-in Indian blogger who would work much harder than me and for a quarter of my salary.There probably aren't a ton of Indians who could replace me, but there don't need to be tons. There only needs to be one.
[Emphasis added]

USDA IT a Big Loser

According to this post at Gov Loop,  the Obama administration's drive to consolidate federal data centers has one of its biggest targets in USDA, going from 46 data centers now to 5 in the future. (Only DHS has a bigger percentage drop.)  The large number of data centers is a reflection of the decentralized nature of the department, which I've referred to in the past.  The history of USDA is the development of individual agencies, each doing business its own way, and each resisting efforts by the departmental offices to consolidate. 

When I joined ASCS, we had data processing centers in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. In the 70's the department took over the mainframes and the Minneapolis office was closed.  But today, FSA uses centers in New Orleans, Kansas City, and St. Louis, having picked up the latter from the 1994 reorg with FmHA.  I say "uses", because the centers are run by the department, though last I knew FSA had programmers in both KC and St. Louis.  Congresspeople tend to resist closures, so whether the new Tea Partiers can overcome that chauvinism and the Obama administration can enforce its ideas will be interesting.

A Problem of Terminology: Hollow "Agencies"

I think this is true: discussion of improving management in government, particularly IT, stumbles on a simple fact of terminology--much of the literature uses "agency" to mean "department" (because they also want to include the independent agencies, and "department-level" or similar wording seems too awkward).  See this discussion of IT management.  The problem is that it leads to the easy assumption that the "agency" is a cohesive unit, where the agency head and her CIO can control the operations of the agency's components.

For USDA, and I suspect at other government departments, the idea of the "agency" as being cohesive and under the direction of the Secretary and his CIO is laughable. Even after the reorganization of the department in the Clinton Administration, there's a bunch of agencies which do not snap to when the Secretary yells: "attention". Just ask ex-Secretary Glickman about his efforts to do some integration of NRCS and FSA.

Cap Gemini and USDA

GSA gave Cap Gemini a 7-year blanket purchase agreement for services for USDA, including FSA's MIDAS.

Sometime 35 years ago or so, CAP Gemini did work for ASCS.  At that time the idea was to get a view of the critical data ASCS managers needed and give it to them timely.  My impression from a friend who was trying to get work achieved was that management said something like: "data, what data? WE don't need no stinking data. Go away and don't bother us."

Mitch Daniels Is a Good Governor? But Not Digitally

Mitch Daniels, former director of OMB, current governor of Indiana, and possible Presidential candidate may have a good reputation in some circles, but apparently he didn't get Indiana moving in the IT area.

[Updated: David Brooks has picked him in the Times as the Republicans Presidential candidate in 2012 (see Althouse on this) but Cato only gave him a B for his governorship.]

Data Modeling

One of the things I learned to do while working at USDA was data modeling: specifically to figure out how different data items should relate.  In the old old days of 80-character punch cards, we knew each farmer/producer had a social security number, a name, and an address, with the latter fields restricted in length.  By the 1990's we knew a customer could have multiple ID numbers at different times and multiple addresses. 

Today I had my nose rubbed in the fact private corporations still have difficulty with data modeling.  Because there some security breach somewhere in their system, my credit card issuer sent replacement cards, with new numbers.  So I faced the problem of going through all the people with whom I do business online and updating my credit card number. So I had to go through 20 or so accounts, trying to change my credit card number.

Some companies, like Amazon, set up an account which can contain one or more credit cards.  Their modeling allows you to go in, delete the old card and add the new card.  I suspect this makes it easier for them to maintain their historical data.  Others allow you to change the card number,which works fine for the user, maybe not so much for data integrity.

The most aggravating companies are those, such as magazine publishers and my alma mater, which tie the credit card data to the end of the transaction for renewing a subscription.  Presumably they programmed a quick and dirty way: when you login to renew the subscription, the old record is copied to the new record and displayed.  What that means is I can't update the number today.  When it comes time to renew I'll either have to remember to change it then (not likely, not at my age) or rely on the company's validation process for credit card numbers.

Vilsack Blows My Mind?

The Post carried an email, supposedly from Secretary Vilsack to all employees in USDA, discussing the Sherrod episode.

What stuns me is the idea that Vilsack is able to email all employees in USDA, at least directly.  I personally doubt the IT folks have gotten that far.  It's also amazing that, while he suggests that employees read the blog post he wrote, he apparently doesn't provide the link or the URL.

I'm Wrong About Google Searching

One thing I realized this week--I've been wrong about using Google to search. 

Background:  I've been impatient with bureaucracies, particularly governmental, which design their own search facilities.  I think I've said on this blog a time or two that people should just use Google. 

Why am I wrong?  Well, Google at the base is using links to prioritize its results.  So, if we're talking about a collection of documents, say Federal Register documents or FSA handbooks, which don't have internal links, it would seem Google would do a lousy job of searching them.

Now I've made that admission, I'm done admitting errors for the year.

I Helped Create a Monster

Farm Policy reports on calls for simplifying farm programs. Neither ACRE nor SURE work in all parts of the country.

I'm afraid I take a little credit for this.  By participating in installing computers and software programs in FSA county offices in the mid-80's, I became an "enabler".  Essentially we enabled the idiots in Congress and the farm lobby groups to design new and more complicated programs. I apologize.

Ms Sullivan, C-Span and the FBI

I was channel surfing, partially catching Fran Sullivan, GWB's staffer over DHS, etc.  Quite interesting, in that she's coming from a bureaucratic perspective, and some of the audience were also bureaucrats (i.e Chertoff, Ben-Veniste).  One thing which caught my attention in the area of sharing data was mention of the FBI's case file system.  As she observed, if the key to your filing system is a case tied to an individual, and all information gets entered in that system, you're liable to be unable to find  data which doesn't.  Unfortunately the case file is embedded in the FBI's DNA, so their ability to design their software is limited.  Rather like FSA's reliance on county files.

FSA Awards Contract for MIDAS

FSA awarded its MIDAS contract to SRA  (It's what I would consider a "Beltway Bandit"--a consulting house with no particular background in USDA.  Made about $1.5 billion in revenue last year and has about 7,000 employees.  

I hope they do better work for FSA than they do for themselves: when I searched for "USDA" on their website I got a page which was unreadable because of the dark blue background to black letters. When I copied the text, this is what I saw:

• Search
• Sitemap
• Contact Us

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