[TriLUG] mostly OT: Tech Lobbyist

[Danielle White via TriLUG]

On 2015-09-24 11:34, Aaron Joyner via TriLUG wrote:
> There's a large / entrenched base of government IT workers who
> support the
> existing systems (desktops, web servers, app servers, etc).  There's
> also
> likely a large quantity of somewhat-specialized software for which
> FLOSS
> alternatives may not be fully baked for yet (think GIS, accounting,
> etc).
> Migrating all those systems to FLOSS alternatives is an excellent
> long-term
> goal, but government tends to move very slowly in this regard for
> many of
> those reasons.

Given my few years of experience as a state employee in IT, there's a 
large amount of aversion to risk and solid non-technical reasons for 
that. Staying with what they already have and doing the minimum needed 
to keep it working is a safer bet when risks like any sort of resource 
budget overrun (which includes deadlines, personnel needed, etc.) are 
something that you quickly learn to avoid at all costs because of the 
repercussions for doing so. While it can save money, the budgeting 
system is painfully exacting about how money can be moved, which can 
lead to situations where a rack of servers that are on lease but have 
depreciated to the point that they can be purchased for less than the 
annual lease payments remain leased because it proves effectively 
impossible to move the funds between the budget lines to purchase. There 
are a lot of laws that were added to end abuses but become obstacles in 
new and exciting ways.

There are a lot of very talented people doing work and succeeding often 
in spite of the system rather than because of it, and there's a pretty 
significant flight of talent to the private sector for that reason. For 
one friend it even proved most fortuitous; she was repeatedly passed 
over for some policy reasons for a high-level IT position in OPM and 
went corporate as a result, which meant she wasn't caught up in the data 
breach issue.

-- 
Danielle at whitrel.com
http://danielle-white.info/