The Obama administration’s IT nightmare

From the Washington Post:

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

In many ways, the move into the White House resembled a first day at school: Advisers wandered the halls, looking for their offices. Aides spent hours in orientation, learning such things as government ethics rules as well as how their paychecks will be delivered. And everyone filled out a seemingly endless pile of paperwork.

There were plenty of first-day glitches, too, as calls to many lines in the West Wing were met with a busy signal all morning and those to the main White House switchboard were greeted by a recording, redirecting callers to the presidential Web site. A number of reporters were also shut out of the White House because of lost security clearance lists.

It’s easy here to turn this into another George Bush joke, but I’m gonna pass on that. Everybody’s had a moment like this, your first day at a new office and you sit down at your desk, power up your workstation, and say “WTF is this shit?!” You know and I know that lots of people live like this every day without ever once imagining that something might be wrong with the situation. Other people (like me) immediately and vociferously start railing about the inadequacies of the system, and start unilaterally trying to change everything, until they either get sick of running their head into the wall or they finally go mad (or they quit; one time I actually did quit).

I have full faith in the technological acumen of the new administration (look at the campaign if you want the proof). They’ll get there. Just like we’ll all get there. But it’s gonna take time, and work, and more work.

Listen. Computers for the masses have only existed for the last twenty years or so, and for that entire time we have existed under a completely b0rk3n technological monoculture (duo-culture if you want to count Apple, but I don’t). Put those two items together, and you can see why it’s taken us so long as a society to even realize that this shit’s broken. As long as we’ve had computers, we’ve existed solely within this paradigm, so much so that we (The People) couldn’t even see past the walls that there might be better ways of doing these things. Now that we are starting to see that, we’re starting to see just how damn much work it’s gonna be to get out of the box we allowed to be built around us. There’s just such a massive installed base, and so much information held hostage in these broken systems, that it’s impossible to just say “Fuck this, we’re starting over.” Data migration, data portability, data transparency. These are major issues, they will have profound effects on the future of our society, and they’re the same whether you’re the president of the Rotary Club or the President of the United States.

But so help me God, we’re gonna get there. In ten years, fifteen years, you’re gonna look back on all these ridiculous rants of mine and say “Goddamn, he was right.” Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

-p.