Friday, October 03, 2008
What if I became CIO of the Federal Government?
I would immediately change ten things to improve the architecture of the Federal government...
1. The government has way too many consulting firms and not enough IT employees. We are paying way more for IT than we should.
2. Now that Wall Street is doomed, I would steal some of the best architects from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. The enterprise architects in the government are big fat jokes.
3. I would institute a work from home program. Do you know that they waste even more time in DC than in corporate America on the notion of facetime.
4. I would hire Robert McIlree as chief process architect. His first task would be to align all process weenies under his vision. His first task would be to keep them away from real IT professionals and work on something really important such as figuring out best practices in sharpening number two pencils.
5. I would flush CMMi and stop funding Carnegie Mellon. I would divert more funding to things that provide value such as NIST and OWASP as the security of the government IT ecosystem is horrific.
6. I would lobby congress on a daily basis that they can improve their communication with the folks that elected them by embracing blogs and wikis.
7. I would hire James Robertson as my CTO and make his first task the elimination of dead languages such as Smalltalk out of the ecosystem.
8. I would ask the CIA to arrest Richard Stallman and find some obscure law that would force him to develop closed source software for the government.
9. I would use the same law and force Larry Ellison to make Oracle contribute more to open source.
10. I would give every non-technical IT manager thirty days to either fire themselves or step up and become a strong technical leader. Management and leadership are not interchangeable words. The government has way too much management and not enough leadership.
| | View blog reactions1. The government has way too many consulting firms and not enough IT employees. We are paying way more for IT than we should.
2. Now that Wall Street is doomed, I would steal some of the best architects from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. The enterprise architects in the government are big fat jokes.
3. I would institute a work from home program. Do you know that they waste even more time in DC than in corporate America on the notion of facetime.
4. I would hire Robert McIlree as chief process architect. His first task would be to align all process weenies under his vision. His first task would be to keep them away from real IT professionals and work on something really important such as figuring out best practices in sharpening number two pencils.
5. I would flush CMMi and stop funding Carnegie Mellon. I would divert more funding to things that provide value such as NIST and OWASP as the security of the government IT ecosystem is horrific.
6. I would lobby congress on a daily basis that they can improve their communication with the folks that elected them by embracing blogs and wikis.
7. I would hire James Robertson as my CTO and make his first task the elimination of dead languages such as Smalltalk out of the ecosystem.
8. I would ask the CIA to arrest Richard Stallman and find some obscure law that would force him to develop closed source software for the government.
9. I would use the same law and force Larry Ellison to make Oracle contribute more to open source.
10. I would give every non-technical IT manager thirty days to either fire themselves or step up and become a strong technical leader. Management and leadership are not interchangeable words. The government has way too much management and not enough leadership.
