How do we increase IT competence in the public sector? There's no reason important servers should be running on Windows machines with "backups" consisting of making a copy of a file on the same hard drive as the original.
According to an ancient Chinese parable, a lord once asked his physician – whose two brothers were also healers – which of the three was the most skilled. This doctor was renowned for his expertise and ability in healing throughout China, and he replied, “My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house. My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood. As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions and massage skin, so my name gets out and is heard among the lords.
The second call back is always more expensive for them, but sometimes someone needs to touch the stove themselves to see it’s hot.
If you genuinely can’t afford it, I’ll help for free, but there’s only so much time in the day and I won’t eat the cost of stupid or politics.
Also aren't their some pretty tough mandates like x% of companies must be minority owned etc. I imagine it allows those companies to charge extortionist rates because they hit the relevant quotas and nobody else does.
> Also aren't their some pretty tough mandates like x% of companies must be minority owned etc. I imagine it allows those companies to charge extortionist rates because they hit the relevant quotas and nobody else does.
One thing I saw was that the big players will have employees who fit the desired characteristics, and they just spin those employees off into their own corporation as needed.
Is there any chance that something like this might be done for IT? Or is it all too young to be done sensibly?
We did wait for a fire to create building codes, it just was a long time before either of us were born: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...
There was certainly plenty of fires before that but this one was terrible enough to cause a public outcry.
An individual city council is not free to learn the lessons again the hard way, no matter how tight the budget and how close the elections. Either it meets the code, or it gets closed down.
The hardest thing for me to do was convince anyone to get me money. They STILL have servers running that were purchased in 2007-2008. (I moved all critical services off, and made damn sure backups worked). It took two years before I was able to convince the board to give me $5000 for server hardware alone. That went towards the most needed hardware too, not my wish list.
This was before I was able to get things set up so I was able to buy something under $500 without board approval, just needed IT Committee approval. The board required everyone in the county to go through the IT Committee for any purchase related to IT. Printer ink, a $10 wireless mouse, etc. That was the first thing I got rid of while I was there. They only reason they did that was because it gave them power over people. I've seen them turn down people over $15 purchases...
The other person who replied is pretty correct about politics. The board there HATED tech for no reason other than if you weren't in the "old boys club" you were garbage to them and they treated you like that.
So overall, it really gave me a great view on why so many counties are so dysfunctional and why government works so slow (for most things at least). I don't regret my time there, but I wish it didn't take such a toll on me.
/Edit Also, there's no reason that they couldn't have tested backups. I was the only IT person for a county of 350+ PCs and a hospital, and I still managed to test backups every month. Shadow Copies saved me so much time too. I also used linux /pfSense when applicable.
Municipal government doesn't have a sustainable funding model for things like IT unless they are really small or really big. In my city (~100k people), they have 3 guys and a couple of freelancers that work <100 hours a year. The staff make like $40-55k/year.
I got the impression they were a group of people that broadly understood their problems and were finding it very difficult to steer the city towards good solutions.
Although Mr. Johnson was the City's Director of IT, realistically he had very nominal oversight over many of the city's actual IT departments - which were spread across a series of departments with their own employees, budgets, and resources. This was something he had been actively trying to improve but with limited progress.
I don't know what the best solution is - their hiring process is flawed and it's difficult to remove or replace problem employees. The budget is about 60% of what it probably needs to be and there's no path towards improving it.
Knowing exactly how to fix a problem, having the skills to do so, and being absolutely forbidden from actually doing it.
This sounds like one of those "opportunities".
All that said, laments about "how do we fix government X" will never be solved if we deem the cost of entry too high to even attempt to fix it ourselves. Obviously this is all in addition to and outside of any democratic process that would lead to reform of how these positions were managed, performed, etc.
It's actually not something that would be my first choice, but I do personally know people who have been harmed by incompetent/apathetic IT leadership in local governments. It angers me enough that I would consider a career change.