Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws 191
imac.usr writes "A story in today's Washington Post calls to light the utter failure of the nation's most sacred final resting place to modernize its pen-and-paper record system. According to the story, the cemetery's administrators have spent $5 million without managing to accomplish the seemingly simple task of creating a database record of the site's graves. As Virginia senator Mark Warner points out, 'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'"
Accountability (Score:4, Interesting)
Where's accountability when 5 million gets spent and nobody can even make something as simple as a SPREADSHEET?
Even the government can do better than this (Score:5, Interesting)
The article notes that the Veterans' Administration *has* computerized graves registration elsewhere, successfully, covering ten times the number of graves at one-third the cost of this utterly failed effort.
Re:Does it really matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
As cynical as it seems, there is something to that.
I'd wager that a lot of the graves belong to people whose living relatives/descendants have no idea they have a grave there and thus the grave is really only symbolic as part of the visual sea of gravestones.
And then there's the idea that, well, barring the dead walking again, none of those guys are walking again.
The other thing I think of is -- as long as the paper records are maintained (eg, copies stored offsite, new copies made periodically, etc), if they have managed to run the facility for this long, how "necessary" is a computerized database beyond sounding necessary?
Similar Story (Score:3, Interesting)
Computers aren't necessarily the answer to every problem. I heard this story on NPR and part of the uproar is some people aren't buried where they should be. No computer will fix that. Quite disrespectful, but I'm hardly surprised.
In my younger days I wore many hats at a start-up and one of those hats was logistics. We had parts inventory at a local freight company for free because they did lots of business with our assembler.
I go in to do a cycle count one day and the guy pulls out a notebook and gives it to me before my count, telling me it's all in there. You know what? It was. He had dozens of notebooks. One for each assembler customer. This guys niche was basically to segregate the shipping paperwork from inventory accounting. It wasn't a one-man shop either. He made it work and work well. Most of the LDL shippers use grand-unified logistics applications with double and triple entry labor that would make his kind of service an expensive proposition.
Sounds like typical government IT (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet the contractors all bid in good faith, expecting it to be a cake walk like all of us are assuming right now, until they discovered a seething morass of requirements. Things like
Overkill? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever hear of technology overkill?
Make 2 maps keep one somewhere else. Have somebody make a copy of the map - or even make a HAND copied map! Whoa! mind blowing concept! wait... what if you don't know how to draw or write because you typed everything from birth?
What is the temp outside? oh, I'll just press F12 and see what it is at the local airport over the internet OR I could just look out the window to a cleverly placed thermometer...
Rube-goldberg machine: web browser powered widget communicating over a TCP stack over the internet routing to dozens of machines to some database server which is updated by another computer running at the airport with all the same complexity plus has electronics to convert temperature to serial and then to USB... and each layer involves protocols and APIs... sure it works pretty well, but that is a lot of points of failure to read the temp which could differ a bit from my location. Who cares if they have slightly different weather than my house?? Well, if that doesn't matter that much then why am I using such a precise complex network of technology to get ball-park information when I could just stick my head out the door??