Senate introduces IT failures bill: No wiggle room

The Senate introduced a bill establishing guidelines for transparency and reporting on troubled IT projects. The bill defines specific exception thresholds for measuring critical and large government IT projects. Projects exceeding these thresholds will be evaluated for remediation and possible termination.   Here's how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) described the bill, which is called the "2008 Information Technology Investment Oversight Enhancement and Waste Prevention Act" (S. 3384): S. 3384 would amend federal law regarding the oversight of project planning for information technology (IT) systems. The legislation would require chief information officers to identify critical IT projects and would subject each IT project to additional reporting, planning, and monitoring requirements, including corrective actions for projects that fail to meet applicable standards.

Yada, yada, it makes me very tired...

The Veterans Administration has the most highly integrated electronic medical record system in the world called VistA.  It was written quite informally (at the beginning), and became a success because developers, many with clincal backgrounds, were free to kibbutz and coordinate their work with each other without undue bureaucratic burden.  As VistA grew, with size came the unavoidablly higher levels of bureaucracy.

Several years ago, there was a complete boondoggle with some vendor software installed in a VA system in the St Petersburg, Florida area.  Would this bill have helped then?

I just don't know.  Every success I've seen in my developer life has involved a small number of people with a large amount of power and a high level of expertise.  But, since I'm an Indian-level (cowboys and indians everyone from outside the States) developer, and carefully avoid management involvement, my perspective is suspect.

Help us all!

http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=1142