I think the editors of the Wall Street Journal are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction over the crash of the IRS’s web site at the worst possible time, on April 17th:
A Treasury Department Inspector General last fall told Congress: “The IRS’s reliance on legacy (i.e., older) systems, aged hardware, and outdated programming languages pose significant risks to the IRS’s ability to deliver its mission. Modernizing the IRS’s computer systems has been a persistent challenge for several decades and will likely remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.â€
A Government Accountability Office report last year found 166 outstanding recommendations about IT security. Good thing these folks don’t have sensitive information . . .
These deficiencies are a matter of priorities, not funding. The cynical reality is that bureaucracies are shrewd and skimp on core services—taxpayer customer service lines—to extort more public dollars.
They’re conflating the IRS’s internal systems with their web hosts and web pages. A cursory examination of the IRS’s web site suggests that it’s, essentially, state of the art. Hosted by Akamai, built on Drupal, Java, JavaScript, etc. similar to the web sites of many large companies.
I believe that a less superficial examination of the problem would reveal that the failure wasn’t caused by legacy hardware and software but by legacy staff and hopelessly antiquated procurement system. They all but undoubtedly had their web site built for them by consultants and their internal staff were not up to the task of evaluating the consultants’ work. They didn’t do sufficient load testing, maybe did no load testing, and when the system came under load it failed.
It’s a problem very similar to the one that caused Healthcare.gov to fail under comparable circumstances and it happened for the same reasons.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
How much internal IT capability do most government agencies retain? It is my general impression that it is almost entirely outsourced to contractors. If you don’t have internal employees with real capabilities you will never get what you want, or at least that is what we think we see.
Steve
I can only tell you what it’s like in Illinois. Here in Illinois IT is ruled by the department of Central Management Services. They’re the same people responsible for janitorial services and fleet management. CMS sets the policies, provides resources, requests bids, lets the contracts, and makes the purchase decisions.
Just about everybody at CMS is self-trained, has been there for many years, and would be a credit to IT in 2000. That’s why Illinois’s IT environment is very much like what a large company would have had 20 years ago. It’s what CMS is comfortable with. If one of the state’s agencies luck out, the consultants they hire will be good, competent, and conscientious. Otherwise, well, web sites will go down under load.
No one in power cares enough about good governance to make the necessary reforms. It’s not an issue the donor class cares one whit about.
The problem is that there are actual, real costs to failures like this to individuals as well as to the government.