Information Technology was an after thought for most companies when I started working in the private sector. Budgets for things we now consider to be IT were administered by different department managers and things often did not work together. In pre-Cisco days, I remember having a meeting with a senior guy at Silicon Graphics. I and my partners were pitching a new data communication model to him. The more we pitched the further back from the table he pushed. I finally asked him point-blank what was wrong with our pitch. He said that department managers bought SGI workstations and then turned to the corporate network person to make them work together. We were pitching a unified approach and SGI competitors were selling computers the same way, so if SGI made a proposal, it had to be focused around how many seats the engineering manager could get for his budget dollars, not how well everything would work together.
Ezra Klein has an interesting post this morning. Peter Orzag, the departing OMB boss, was talking about IT.
“Closing the IT gap,” he continues, “is perhaps the single most important step we can take in creating a more efficient and responsive government.” He goes on to mention a couple of cool IT initiatives the administration is pursuing, but it’s not clear that they amount to a top-to-bottom effort to overhaul the federal government’s IT infrastructure. That’s a pity, because now would be a good time for that effort (we need the spending) and the payoff, as Orszag says, could be immense.
Part of the problem is undoubtedly Windows. Microsoft has been adept at churning the market. I would like to see the Feds bring in Google boxes and netbooks running Chromium. Windows is not a good solution for 10,000+ seat installations.