[poof131]

Bravo for stepping into government and I wish you the best of luck. Dealing with the bureaucracy is always painful. After a decade in the Navy, I always thought that talented programmers could do so much for the service, but the current system wasn’t designed for them. Just take some of the people making it into Nuke School, move them to a programming pipeline, and form teams to attach to commands to help automate processes, create new processes if applicable, and help with SaaS procurements. Give the teams their own command structure and embed them in a manner similar to JAGs and Docs. Switch IT to DevOps.

Unfortunately, the current software procurement process is totally broken. It is the waterfall to end-all waterfalls. Most of the militaries ‘high tech’ is at least a decade old when it becomes operational. I remember in 2005, using a memory device the size of a brick (it’s nickname) with something like 256kb of memory. It could hold a total of 64 lat-long points. The upgrade to a card holding megabytes was still far behind a cheap thumb drive. Using an IPAD is so much better that the military started to okay flights with them.

Sadly, the military contracting process is so bad that they trap themselves with providers (HP) that border on treasonous behavior. I exaggerate, but when you make a profit off of the military and provide essentially crap, you walk a fine line.[1] Fixing this process from the top will require some serious changes and I wish I new what they were.

http://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/