What on earth could this be? It is the 5 year IT Modernization happening at my employer. We are 4 years into this plan, and the only things being produced are undercooked turd-burgers.

For a number of very valid reasons, my agency is retiring its legacy IBM mainframes and moving to open source software based in the cloud. We have millions and millions of lines of code and this move is a huge, complicated undertaking. We have some really great software and also some crappy software. The trouble is the great software was written 15, 30, 40, and even 50 years ago and the crappy software is what is being written today.

We have our own onsite cloud. It sounds so cool. Unfortunately, it absolutely sucks. Forgive me for being a heretic, but I cringe every time a program is taken out of the mainframe and moved to a web-based version. The IT Department has sworn that they leading us to the promised land. All I see is desert. It’s not just me. All 40 of my coworkers in my office agree with this assessment. Employees use the software all day, everyday. Even our new twenty-something employees that we got from the Peace Corps prefer the old terminal programs over the hot, new crap.

Why? Speed and ease. It takes much more time to accomplish the same work using cloud based web programs as it did using the mainframe programs. The IT Department blamed bandwidth for performance problems for the last 15 years. As a result the managers gave them all the bandwidth they requested. So bandwidth is not a problem. The other issue is ease of use. Back in the old days, the agency trained many of it’s own programmers from recruiting from within. Those programmers had actually done some of the real work at some point. The old programs were written by someone trying to make the program easy for the user. The programmers of today have no relationship to the work, do not understand it, and write programs that are easy to program. The end result is more labor intensive software that is twice as slow (on a good day). The agency swears that there will be huge savings from the IT Modernization in what is spent on IT. However, we have 4,000 people working in IT and 56,000 users. Work got easier for 4,000 people and harder for 56,000. Fortunately, managers will never count how much labor the rest of the agency loses in order for IT to gain.

I must say that the managers have been very smart about this IT Modernization. They did not request special funding from Congress for this effort. Therefore, there is much less scrutiny of it. I think the managers learned a lesson from a $400 million project to move the various legacy systems that we share with all 50 states to a web-based system. The funding for it was gotten through a special request from Congress. The project was a complete failure — a la Cover Oregon. Congress was not happy. The president at the time nominated the person in charge of this failure to head our agency. The Senate refused to confirm the nomination. Lesson learned. So instead of getting a special appropriation from Congress, headquarters has been starving the rest of the agency of funds and staff in order to pay for IT Modernization, so far $863 million.

I apologize for this rant. I hope you have found it amusing. The best way for me to explain my situation is this: I have been driving a 1972 Ford Cobra and it is being taken away. I am being given a brand new Toyota Prius as a replacement. I want my Cobra back.