My family and I after voting
This blog epitomizes my concern about our perceptions of Obama and how he can change the way our government operates. The Web 2.0 community, in particular, believes that this administration can just wave a wand and all sorts of sexy technology will appear. Those of us who have pushed for government Enterprise 2.0 solutions for years, know the sad reality. There are serious bureaucratic, regulatory and legal barriers that need to be addressed.
If you’re looking for a nice summary of all the issues and recommended solutions for applying social media in government, check out this link.
First To Say It
(I know I’m going to pay for this later, but . . .) Lewis Shepherd got it right with his latest blog, even the President must adhere to rules and laws established years (sometimes hundreds of years) before. It’s not like he doesn’t want to change, there are just some history attached to the present state of the White House’s IT environment. Past White Houses (the outgoing one being an exception) have also been cognizant of making the ivory tower more ivory. Underinvestment and sensible purchases pre-occupy the minds of those on Pennsylvania Avenue. Why? Because their lives are under a microscope and all a Congress person or Senator needs to do is say “The President disregarded the law . . .” and heads roll.
The Legacy of Dick Cheney
Let’s talk about two dominating forces that dominate government procurements.
Prohibition of Accepting Free Services: The Federal Government is prohibited from accepting free services from the private sector. If you have a problem with this, please take it up with your elected representatives. This makes the importation of open source solutions rather difficult. According to the law, you must pay for software services in some way shape or form. I have seen government clients get around this cleverly by justifying/authorizing/using their existing beltway bandit IT staff to install the solution.
Sole Sourcing: Under very special circumstances, the Federal government can evaluate and determine that a particular company has a solution that no one else in the free market has or other circumstances make it necessary to pre-select a vendor. Microsoft enjoys such a status because it has the only operating system for PCs. Linux doesn’t count because its free (see above). This is called a sole source procurement or an “Other Than Full and Open Competition” contract action. Thank you, very much Dick Cheney, for ruining sole source procurements for the rest of us. Due to the controversy surrounding the obscenely large dollar value of Haliburton sole source contracts in Iraq, many government agencies have imposed restrictions on letting sole source contracts.
What We Can Expect
Its not all doom and gloom. If other areas of the Executive Branch have been able to bring in Web 2.0 solutions, then there is hope for the White House. Battleships turn, but turn slowly. The most important thing we can do as citizens is participate in the debate and make the Congress and the Federal bureaucracy defend stupid. That being said, we also need to be the most informed on the topic. We need to understand the constraints and offer workable solutions. It is not sufficient to criticize, we need to innovate and act.
