RichVR
1992
That sounds like a terroristic threat.
I’m no domestic terrorist, but telling government officials on camera you’re about to do some terrorism seems like poor strategy.
Their families are starving? We have a famine in the U.S.?
I mean, that guy is eating their food.
Thrag
1996
It’s hard to put food on your family.
So … (gets out calculator) … three tenths of one percent of the population, then?
Some places are just cursed
People love to gather around flammable liquids.
Everyone loves bombfires!
jpinard
2001
Why do government agencies seem to have the dumbest and worst IT departments?
What kind of moron does a data migration, and doesn’t keep an intact set of pre-migration data on backup for the next 1-2 years?
The perception is that they are low-paying jobs for technology, and that they’re unappealing technology environments where nothing cool is being done. I know that a government agency job at any level was never in my consideration set back when I was in the game, because they couldn’t afford me. And it was hard enough trying to convince young technology people to come work for something as boring as a hotel company; I can’t imagine how you sell them on working for e.g. the DMV.
It costs money, and taxpayers don’t actually see or understand the results of the money.
Honestly, you have to keep in mind how many people argued and complained about having to leave Windows 7, or XP because it wasn’t supoorted. So, governments realize that taxpayers don’t understand or care about IT, and so put the minimum amount of money behind it.
IT is a lot of infrastructure, but even more poorly understood.
jpinard
2004
And look how well that works out.
Uhhh, me. All the time. Typical rollback window for a big migration project is 7-60 days, depending on the nature of the application.
Now all that being said, long term data retention policies and controls should have been in place. So data from the “old” platform should have been securely stored in an off-site backup and thus restorable. That obviously wasn’t the case here.
This kind of failure story is what I call an “iceberg” story. You see the dramatic visible dysfunction and it pretty much implies that there is a LOT more dysfunction you aren’t seeing right under that waterline . . .
Yes, very much this. A lot of operations continue to function on a combination of luck and the heroism of one star employee. If the luck or the heroism ever slips, watch out!
Different applications demand different levels of thoroughness, too. You might think that a police department’s data that was crucial to ongoing and future criminal prosecutions and appeals, etc. might warrant more long-term retention and back up than, say, the accounts receivable for a bakery or something.
But the point about IT not being an area into which the government doesn’t want to sink any money rings very true. I think it is in someway also true for many types of bureaucracies. Educational IT is one of the last bastions of ancient enterprise computing dinosaur thought for example. The idea that faculty who are expected to teach cutting-edge stuff in programs that are marketed as cutting edge tech programs, and who are expected to make use of all the cool and fancy stuff out there that marketing people love to show in their ads, might actually need, you know, modern computers seems alien to IT people in higher ed. It seems fairly normal to treat faculty computers like toasters or something, replacing them every ten or so years as they literally cease to work, rather than understanding that yearly updates sometimes are actually necessary. And let’s not get started on the machines in the actual classrooms…
IT everywhere is held up by duck tape and lack of hacker interest.
It would not surprise me if a LOT of digital evidence turns out to be not available at trial time, due to incompetent indexing, archiving, etc.
And the real system documentation is handed down via oral tradition.
CraigM
2011
Man I try my best to mail that shit down in written form. I create on average a dozen significant KBA documents a year.
And still…
