Will DOJ Tech Project Die After 10 Years?
From the post:
A secure, interoperable radio network that the Department of Justice has been working on for more than a decade and that has cost the agency $356 million may be headed for failure, according to a new report by the agency’s inspector general.
According to the report, inadequate funding, frequent revisions to DOJ’s plans, and poor coordination threaten the success of the Integrated Wireless Network (IWS) and could leave the agency with obsolete radio equipment that doesn’t communicate well with other radio systems, which could in turn pose a threat to public safety.
The program, DOJ’s response to the 9/11 Commission’s push for interoperable law enforcement communications, originally aimed to provide wireless communications to more than 81,000 federal law enforcement agents nationwide in the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of the Treasury. General Dynamics, one of IWN’s top contractors, claims that the project could also save agency costs in the long run by reducing the number of radio towers by more than 50%.
At page 33:
As we found in our 2007 audit, establishing the requirements and designing a system that met the needs of a diverse group of users proved troublesome and time consuming because the users had conflicting priorities and all users believed that their needs were the most important. We found that little has changed since our 2007 audit.
I mention this horror story not because it is particularly relevant to topic maps from a technical standpoint but it is very relevant in terms of future government contracts.
You may or may not have heard about plans to consolidate federal agencies, cost cutting measures, etc., most of which have a mis-guided faith that technology can solve what are governance or personnel issues.
Trust me on this one: Technology cannot solve governance or personnel issues. Not even topic maps can do that. 😉 Truth be told, no technology can.
Nor can any technology make us more willing to listen to other opinions, willing to consider evidence for positions we “know” aren’t true, etc.
To be sure, all the contractors got paid in this sad story but the public (that would be the rest of us), aren’t any better off. In fact we may be worse off.