[nostromo]

> I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent

There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue.

With such a large organization, there are undoubtedly large swaths of both incompetence and competence.

The challenge with any large organization is that the rules are there to reign in the bad people, but are equally enforced on the good. (For example, most people won't abuse their company's T&E policy, but some will, so everyone has to be treated as suspect.)

Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

[squidfood]

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

Didn't mean to imply that any sufficiently large organization shouldn't have an audit trail and reasonable accountability!

[mwsherman]

I would offer that those two concepts are optimized for ex-post-facto blame. It’s not simply gov’t, as you point out, it’s large organizations.

To contrast this with more modern techniques, ‘audit trail’ is simply source control. And most of us don’t go into source control looking for a smoking gun.

It’s rarely necessary if a process is agile/iterative. Bugs will be (relatively) small and recent in time. So the notion of going back six months and figuring out ‘what went wrong’ is just not a thing. Wrong happens every day, in small amounts, transparently.

Conversely, a bug if truly large and undetected, and explodes a year from its creation, then the whole team is to blame. We’ve all looked at the code hundreds of times in that period.

[6d0debc071]

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

Maybe not, but "treat me as a liar" doesn't seem viable either.

Any time you take an extra measurement you introduce a chance for that measurement to be in error. If you make that it so that any single measurement is a show-stopper, then every time you add an extra check you make things a little bit worse, right up to the point where your false positive rate overwhelms your data.

Even with an extremely low error rate, the number of best deals in the world for a given thing is 1. If the goal of your system is to get that, then making any measuring system a single point of failure that tests once is a death sentence. If the number of good and honest software houses that will respond to your call is low, then your false positive rate is going to be extremely high... and again, having such a system is going to be ill-advised.

Especially if the system itself suffers from not having the people who are actually going to be using the system, and people who understand how the systems should be created and run, making at least part of the decisions.

If there were a greater degree of feedback between procurement, requesters, and providers, with the ability to modify the plan, then you could potentially check your work - reducing the consequences of such failures. Not "absolute trust," but at least "hear my side of the story, maybe you've just misunderstood something."

[allochthon]

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."

I agree -- this is not a simple challenge. But I don't think stultifying bureaucracy is the answer, either. There must be some government out there, somewhere in the world, that has sorted out an efficient, effective procurement process.

[saraid216]

> But I don't think stultifying bureaucracy is the answer, either.

Something that seems hard for people to grasp is that "stultifying bureaucracy" wasn't an "answer". It's the natural consequence of not having an answer. We have the luxury of sitting back on an Internet forum pontificating on the drudgery; they have to enact the laws that Congress passed.

> There must be some government out there, somewhere in the world, that has sorted out an efficient, effective procurement process.

The main examples of the same scale and scope as the US are Brazil, China, Russia, and India. All of these have been regularly painted as worse: more corrupt, more stonewalling, more favoritism. Whether that's just American propaganda or if there are specific processes that can be imported without breaking things is worth examining.

[eru]

Perhaps you should look at the smaller countries. Like Singapore?

[allochthon]

I like that idea. There might be a good process in place at a smaller scale that can be scaled up.

What is it about Singapore's procurement process that stands out to you? (I don't know anything about it.)

[eru]

I don't know enough about the process to comment, but judging by the results it must be pretty good. They have a good track record of finishing government projects on schedule and budget.

[dllthomas]

'Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."'

This might be a good starting point:

http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Outliers-Enabling-Society-Thrive...