Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

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It's essentially a broken attempt to avoid nepotism and gives the illusion of 'fairness'. Having worked in two different state governments for over 10 years of my IT career (some of it in management) I can assure you that most of the people in positions of power aren't really forward thinking enough with technology and IT.

Also, most governments have made a feeble attempt to move toward a 'one size fits all' type of IT structure. This includes state run data centers, state-wide Active Directory structures, procurements services, buying from approved hardward and software vendors, yada, yada, yada. They didn't care that software from approved vendor A met 48% of my needs list whereas software from vendor B met 98% of my needs list at a fraction of the cost. Vendor A had been approved by procurement and vendor B hadn't. How are we to know your Cousin Billy doesn't own and run vendor B? How do we know you aren't receiving a kickback for buying from vendor B?

Which leads me to another ridiculous rule under State Government...I wasn't allowed to receive anything from a vendor (worth > $10) as a gift, if it wasn't also available to the general public. So say I am interested in buying a server for $4500 and I'm on the fence. The vendor wants to throw in 2 years of 7X24 technical support for 2 years if I buy the server from them. NOPE. If the general public can only buy the same server and get 5X8 for 1 year. I wasn't allowed to even (on the fly) negotiate a better deal.

I've spent quite a lot of time in state government, and agree with much of what you say (but see edit, below) -- but your description in the last paragraph seems to conflate common kinds of ethics rules on what you as a state employee are allowed to receive with rules for what the state is allowed to receive. Usually, the type of thing you discuss wouldn't fall under the no-gift type of ethics rules that would usually have a token exception like the under $10 one you mention, which usually apply to gifts to state employees, especially contract decision makers. It might be problematic for other reasons, though, under contract bidding rules (since essentially the vendor would be bidding on a contract with a different scope of work than the publicly announced RFP/RFO/IFB, and thus there wouldn't be fair competition between bids for the same thing.)

EDIT: But not the initial comment about anti-corruption/anti-nepotism -- contracting out everything isn't a fix for nepotism/corruption -- indeed, statutory rules restricting contracting out (which, IME, state agencies are very good at working around when they aren't just ingoring them outright) are attempts to restrict nepotism/corruption. More often, the contracting out is because budget rules make it administratively simpler in practice, even if the theoretical conditions that should apply are harder, to contract out then to get additional state positions. (An example of how this can manifest is rules which require legislative action both to appropriate funds and to assign positions to an agency to perform that function, but where using appropriated funds to contract out doesn't require separate legislative action, even if it requires the agency to certify that the work cannot be done by workers in any civil service classification.)

To put my comment into context, I'm already forced to purchase a server from say Dell, off of their state website because they've already been put on price agreement, which means they've already bid on and won the right to sell to the state. There is no RFP, there is no other procurement process other than to order it off of price agreement.

But having said that, even with companies on price agreement, I wasn't allowed to take anything else that they might offer me if it wasn't also being given to the general population. A quick story: I received a really nice backpack from HP when I bought one of their very first "convertible" tablets (this would have been around 2008-09). When I purchased it, the site made no mention of the "extras" and I had to tell my boss that I received these without being aware that I was going to get them.

So I guess with this bigger picture 840M$ sounds like a cheap mistake now...

No the process to procure a contract is broken. What doesn't seem to be broken, at least from my perspective, is how you manage the contract once it's been won. I have a background in which I was responsible for putting out an RFP, grading the vendors, granting the contract, etc.

Unfortunately there are still a LOT of people in state government and elsewhere, whose eyes glaze over at the simple mention of IT. For them, it's a relief when you hear names like Oracle or IBM or Microsoft who win contracts. "Surely I've heard of Oracle. They're a big technology company and surely they'll know what they're doing". Relief ensues because NO REGULAR PEOPLE WANT THE BURDEN OF MANAGING AN IT PROJECT.

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