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Billing and Meetings Remain Easier Than Usable Digital Systems

I have bumped against digital initiatives in government and industry a number of times. The experience and understanding I gained were indispensible. Do you remember the “paperless office”? The person attributed with creating this nifty bit of jargon was, if memory serves me, Harvey Poppel. I worked with the fellow who coined this term. He also built a piano. He became an investment wizard.

Later I met a person deeply involved with reducing paperwork in the US government. The fellow, an authoritative individual, ran an advertising and marketing company in Manhattan. I recall that he was proud of his work on implementing strategies to reduce dead tree paper in the US government. I am not sure what happened to him or his initiative. I know that he went on to name a new basketball arena, selecting a word in use as the name of a popular vitamin pill.

Then a mutual acquaintance explained the efforts of an expert who wrote a book about Federal digitalization. I enjoyed his anecdotes. I was, at the time, working as an advisor to a government unit involved in digital activities, but the outfit ran on paper. Without paper, the Lotus Notes system could not be relied upon to make the emails and information about the project available. The fix? Print the stuff on paper. The idea was to go digital, but the information highway was built on laser printer paper.

I thought about these interactions when I read “A Decade into a Project to Digitize U.S. Immigration Forms, Just 1 is Online.” (If the link is dead, please, contact the dead tree publisher, not me.)

According the article:

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms. A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

I am not surprised. The article uses the word “mismanaged” to describe the process upon which the development wheels would turn.

The write up included a quote to note:

“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ said Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.”

What’s interesting is that those involved seem to be trying very hard to implement a process which puts data in a database, displays information online, and reduces the need for paper, the stuff from dead trees.

The article suggests that one vendor (IBM) was involved in the process:

IBM had as many as 500 people at one time working on the project. But the company and agency clashed. Agency officials, for their part, held IBM responsible for much of the subsequent failure, documents show.

The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008.

Several observations are warranted, but these are unlikely to be particularly life affirming:

1. The management process is usually not focused on delivering a functioning system. The management process is designed to permit billing and cause meetings. The actual work appears to be cut off from these administrative targets of having something to do and sending invoices for services rendered.
2. Like other interesting government projects such as the upgrading of the IRS or the air traffic control system, figuring out what to do and how to do it are sufficiently complex that everyone involved dives into details, political considerations, and briefings. Nothing much comes from these activities, but they constitute “work” so day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year process becomes its own goal. The new system remains an abstraction.
3. No one working on a government project, including government professionals and contractors, has responsibility to deliver a solution. Projects become a collection of fixes, which are often demonstrations of a small scale function. The idea that a comprehensive system will actually deliver a function results in software quite similar to the famous HealthCare.gov service.

I am tempted to mention other US government initiatives. I won’t. Shift to the United Kingdom. That country has been working on its National Health Service systems for many years. How similar have been the initiatives to improve usability, functionality, and various reductions. These have ranged from cost reduction to waiting time reduction.  The project is not that different from US government efforts.

What’s the fix?

Let me point out that digitization, computerization, and other Latinate nominatives are fated to remain in a state of incompletion. How can one finish when when the process, not the result, is the single most important objective.

I heard that some units of Angela Merkel’s government are now using traditional typewriters. Ah, progress.

Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2015

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