Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends | Hacker News Reader

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

arstechnica.com

42 pointsReltair46 comments

This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism.

It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard.

There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an ineffective team, but this isn't it.

From the article:

"even internal projects like Orca were dependent on quick fixes from outside talent"

I don't see anywhere that it implies that Orca was built by Best Buy.

The whole article ends with a paragraph on Orca, implying the issues discussed above were the cause of Orca. As I said a careful reading will indicate that they were completely unrelated, but the article is written in such a way that many people will conclude from the article that they are related.

Look at the other comments people have made about the article, how many are from people who think the article is about operational IT and how many think it's about strategically important custom software ?

The fail-whale articles about Orca talked about how it was a Microsoft partner that built it.

The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal of the campaign.

Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished. Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?

I'm guessing that the party organization itself isn't allowed to do anything other than nominate their candidate. The campaign, of which the GOTV system is a part, has to be directed by the candidate. This makes sense in that you're technically electing a person, not a party.

Sure, but the party could contract with a consulting group, which could take on the winner as a client.

It is all the same people circulating between the parties and the campaigns and the consultancies and the PACs.

I quite liked the profile of @harper in The Atlantic the other day, even if it was a little too fawning.

To me the lesson to be drawn from these articles is that the Obama campaign saw their IT infrastructure as a 'core business unit' and vertically integrated it, whereas the Romney campaign treated it like any other commodity service.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...

Um.

At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company.

This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

On the other hand, who doesn't think that their own company is the best for any given job?

That is why the leader's job is to critically assess conflicts of interests in subordinates.

With all the talk of this being a big data driven election I was surprised to not see Palantir utilised by either party.

If I was running for office I would be giving those guys a call.

Companies that milk the government all four years try to avoid the partisan fray during elections. There is a parallel industry dedicated to campaigns.

Any defense contractor that accepts employment by a campaign should be guilty for mutiny and treason.

Wow, he ran his campaign like the ran the companies he destroyed/raided.

You have to wonder how this incompetence translated into electoral failure. Maybe a better businessman would have given Obama a challenge.

> In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work.

I wonder how many hours that actually ended up being. $12,000 for six months seems like a pittance, but if his job involved showing up on Sunday afternoons and making sure that security patches had been installed Saturday night, that doesn't seem like a bad bargain.

I suspect it was a massive workload that came with the benefit of working for something that you believe in and developing contacts at the highest levels. Political campaigns tend to work young people very hard for very little money with the expectation that you're gaining invaluable experience.

> Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from old friends.

This is a decent way of having a lot of small groups doing their own thing. It's a terrible way to coordinate an organization as a whole to accomplish a specific goal.

This is probably unfair and biased, but what the heck.

If this whole story is true, it seems crazy that this man nearly became president. He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way.

Anybody knowledgeable in IT should have been able to tell him that this approach was a bad idea. I mean, Best Buy's consulting subsidiary? They probably thought Best Buy was a cool place that was "with it" when it came to tech. How clueless can you get?

It sure sounds like the Romney campaign's IT was run on "connections" and ideology rather than sound technology. This was probably a good way to run a campaign a few decades ago, but doesn't seem to work as well today.

It will be interesting to see how this stuff evolves, anyway. The US presidential campaign cycle is so slow relative to the technology sector that it seems hard to apply lessons from previous elections. The current smartphone revolution was just getting off the ground in 2008, so there wasn't much experience to draw on for 2012. By the time 2016 rolls around, will 2012's experience be similarly obsolete?

This seems like confirmation bias, mixed with a healthy dose of overestimating the importance of your profession.

If a similar story came out about Obama's campaign, would you have really written that it's crazy that he got elected?

I'm not a Romney fan, and I think this story should be embarrassing for him, but let's not get carried away. Running a software project (even if not directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential candidate at your peril.

Running the nation isn't easy, either. You're supposed to delegate responsibility to people who know what they are doing.

I do agree that presidents shouldn't need to be technologists. It's nice if they are, but being able to run a software product is not the most important thing for a potential president to run.

However, that doesn't mean lessons can't be gleamed and abstracted. The President has to outsource a lot of knowledge and work. Presidents are typically experts at something, but not at most things. President Obama is a former Constitutional Law Professor. It's reasonable to assume that he understands Constitutional Law at a very high level; it's also reasonable to assume that Constitutional Law is one of the few things that he has a very high level of expertise at.

All Presidents have to work with other experts and teams to get things done. The fact that Governor Romney's tech teams failed so badly can be looked at a mark of his management abilities. He doesn't need to be a tech expert, but he does need to know how to put the right people in place to be successful.

I look at these failings as a case study as to what could of happened with other areas Governor Romney could have had to outsource: defense leadership, diplomacy, transportation policy and vision, etc.

At some point, you can't pass the buck. Steve Jobs said reasons stop mattering when you hit the vp level at Apple. Assuredly reasons have to stop mattering when you reach the level of potential president of the United States of America.

I don't think he was focusing on the software aspect, as much as the business aspect.

Again, I might be bias, but I agree with him, and if Obama had the same mess of where money was going to, I'd be disappointed. This doesn't read like a leader/manager controlling where time and money is spent, but rather a bunch of people going their own route and buying whatever servers their needs.

As a developer, I'd definitely like the latter route. But after time you come to realize that management stepping in and focusing direction is what's really best in the long term.

And if you can't do it yourself, you delegate to someone who can.

In short, this looks like what happens when the workers are running the show, instead of working together under a single driving force.

> I don't think he was focusing on the software aspect, as much as the business aspect.

You're exactly right. We don't really know much of the software side anyway, aside from little details like that it was not adequately tested. I'd be thinking the same thing if a similar failure had happened in any area of Romney's campaign, it just so happens that software failure is 1) what happened and 2) is what gets discussed on HN.

It is hardly an improvement to have centralized micromanagement instead of getting whatever serves their needs.

"Running a software project (even if not directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential candidate at your peril."

Isn't that essentially the entire premise of effective leadership? Substitute "software project" with "X" - knowing who to bring on-board, and how to execute by effectively using those resources to the best of your and their ability despite an endless stream of opposition.

Yes, if a similar story came out about Obama, I would probably say the same thing. Why not? Don't assume I'm automatically for the "other guy" just because I'm against Romney.

As for overestimating the importance of my profession, I don't buy it. It's the importance of project management, not software, that's in play here. The president needs to be the sort of person who can find people who will know that Best Buy is a bad choice. He doesn't need to actually know it himself, but he absolutely needs to be able to find them, in all sorts of areas, and then listen to them.

Honestly, if I had my way, not a single presidential candidate since I've been alive would be qualified. I think our current politicians are atrociously bad. So your point that the bar I'm setting is too high for current candidates may be true, but I don't think it makes me wrong.

> He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry

That's how the law stipulates the campaigns should be run. Money raised for the campaign can go only towards the campaign.

Which means you cannot spend on anything not directly attributable to the campaign (and politicians have been prosecuted for trying to direct that money elsewhere).

It also means you cannot accrue any new expenses on the day after the campaign is over, previous obligations aside.

I was referring to the apparent tendency to outsource work to donors and other people connected to the campaign, and to the apparent effort to run their IT on a shoestring. I don't really understand how the campaign finance laws you refer to are supposed to be related.

Care to explain how you'd run it differently if you were the director of technology? Ask for bigger budget and choose the companies you know instead of the ones the current director of tech knew?

I don't really know how I'd run such a huge project, which is part of why I'm not running for president ever.

Roughly speaking, though, I'd try to hire a core team of really good people and then delegate the crap out of everything. Let them choose whether to outsource and who to outsource to.

People love saying that As hire As while Bs hire Cs. (Who's hiring all of the Bs? Nobody ever seems to talk about that. But I digress.) Well, somebody in the Romney camp ended up hiring a bunch of Cs, it seems, and that doesn't speak well of the top guys, or guy.

This is not too different from what was done - they did have an internal tech team, who was knowledgeable about the tech to the point where they survived the East Coast AWS outage, but then some cracks slipped through.

One problem with hiring A people is the short-term nature of campaign projects - it's hard to attract excellent players who know they'll get the boot come the Election Day (and who maybe aren't interested in government gigs), and that's where consulting companies fit nicely.

Consider two things:

1) The country is extremely divided culturally and politically. I think Romney was correct that there was a very significant percentage of people who would have never voted for him but by that token, there was another significant percentage of people who would have never voted against him. So the percentages in play were small. The best outcome for either candidate was a win that would look small.

2) By the conventional wisdom, the election was Romney's to lose. Running against a president in an economy which is in serious bad shape usually is a great position to be in. In that small group of undecides, Romney should have been doing well.

So I think one could argue that losing by 2% instead of winning by 2% might really be a pathetic fumble, a complete wipe-out given Romney's position when campaign season began.

Heh, did you copy paste "significant... " or did you retype the whole phrase by hand and then forget to change the preposition?

He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way.

That's the way he ran Massachusetts and (for the most part) we didn't like it. There is a reason why he was unpopular when he left office, why his Lt Gov got crushed in the 2006 election following his departure, and why the state voted for Obama over Romney by 20 pts.

Interesting: apparently they paid only $790 for Basecamp, while spending >$1k on Dropbox, >$4k on optimizely/new relic, $20k on salesforce, $1.9k on resumator (?), >$16k on other unknown analytics. Looks like 37signals is severely underpricing it's products (and even then they make tons of money).

They might have gotten it early on though not used it as extensively as they'd planned on using it, but kept paying for it. Just because they'd paid basecamp doesn't mean it was necessarily something that was vitally used at the center of the campaign.

sound like there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get an inside position on the next Administration in four years. I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.

You could probably get funding to create such an infrastructure for other groups that do canvassing, like PIRG, and open source much of it. Then you'd be in a position to sell consulting services.

>I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.

I don't know if I'd make that bet.

Without the right connections I expect you stand little/no chance of getting an audience to have your plan heard and even if you do there will be backers expecting to be handed such work along with half a dozen bigger names claiming to be able to provide identical service.

I'm sure if Nate Silver wants to start a political IT consultancy someone will pay attention to him, but without that kind of demonstrated value - that can only really be demonstrated during an election - I don't see how even the best plan gets any visibility.

It's an interesting idea for sure though.

You'd want to either go through the DNC, NGP/VAN [1], or maybe the Analyst Institute [2]. Those are the groups who both have the right connections and would be willing to take the meeting.

[1] http://www.ngpvan.com/ [2] https://analystinstitute.org/

Honestly, the Obama for America technology team is already ahead of you there with proven delivery. Did you see the Atlantic interview with Harper Reed (OFA's CTO)? If not, it's worth a read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...

(EDIT: Which not to say it's a bad idea, just that there is a well-connected established competitor.)

The 37Signals allotment was high - did they manage the whole campaign in Basecamp?

Wow, that is the first ever known (to the general public case) of a 37s customer. Not a great press hit. And for a Chicago company! That is Obama territory.

Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life. Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.

It appears to me like you're taking the total outsource IT spending and dividing it by the total number of people on the Romney campaign payroll. Of course that yields a non-sensical answer.

510 people seems a bit low for the whole campaign, but assuming you're correct, 1 mil is still a ridiculously small amount of money for such a serious campaign. We're basically talking the position for the most powerful man in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com