How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government | Hacker News Reader

How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government

nytimes.com

17 pointsvibhavs8 comments

I don’t disagree with the sentiment. But as someone who has made his money in IT since the age of 16 I find the whole process here kind of obnoxious.

This isn’t rocket science. O’Reilly is turning this into a means to bolster his profile and sell his conferences but in the end it’s just an issue of IT planning. Good businesses do this sort of thing every day and they don’t need to hold a conference to do it. Whether it’s Government or private business the process is the same.

* Talk to your customers (not pundits) and see what they want

* Look at your database and fill in the blanks to make sure you are collecting what they want

* Plan a delivery mechanism that best fits the needs of your customers

* Implement

It doesn’t take a bunch of conferences and pontificating to make this happen.

It also ignores a lot of the friction in the process - lobbying dollars and campaign contributions in the process. Not to mention the heavily unionized public sector that opposes most forms of productivity improvements given that their dues depends on the number of jobs versus the productivity of government. I guess it's good to be idealistic, or maybe I'm just too cynical about government especially when most of the decisions to date by this administration seem to have resulted in it getting bigger with greater power.

"it’s just an issue of IT planning"

I don't think it is. I think I recognise this problem - this is a case where the customer does not know what they want, because they lack the necessary background to formulate their needs or define their future direction. People without systems engineering experience usually constrain themselves to their perceived understanding of a solution when trying to express their needs.

For example, if you went to a customer five years ago and said "how would you like to edit your documents" they would have described a word processor to you - not Google Docs or Zoho and certainly not Etherpad - it would never occur to them to ask for those features. But show them those features, and they love it.

I have come to believe that you don't ask your customer what they want. You try and guess what you would want in their position, and put that forward as a straw man proposal. The customer has enough mission-specific knowledge to help you perfect your mental model, but they are rarely going to ask for anything innovative of their own accord.

There is a huge potential payoff in banging the right heads together. I have knocked months off a schedule that way. I don't know O'Reilly so I can't tell you whether he is the right person to be doing that, but we definitely could do with someone.

Your post just made my point perfectly. Your experience has allowed you to do your job better. That's the point. O'Reilly is a book publisher and a pundit whose pulling together bloggers to have a Government 2.0 conference which he thinks will somehow solve the problem because, imho, he has no idea how to actually solve the problem. I mean, this is a guy who lists coining Web 2.0 as one of his accomplishments in life

On the other hand someone who actually does this sort of thing for a living and has experience would realize what the problems are and be able to address them appropriately.

"Your experience has allowed you to do your job better. [...] O'Reilly is a [...] pundit"

Well the thing about pundits is, they know people, and people listen to them. Now don't get me wrong - I see inefficiencies in IT infrastructure everywhere I look - government, healthcare, even large areas of science - but nobody asks me my opinion. Maybe if O'Reilly could inflict me on those people for a couple of hours, they would learn something.

[for "me", read "people in our position", not personally me]

I have a lot of sympathy for what I think you are saying - that certain classes of people have a gift for self-promotion and get a lot more credit for things instead of the real technical/systems talent, which makes us feel they don't "deserve" it, but that doesn't mean they bring zero to the table, either.

O'Reilly's attempting to fix Government caused me to suddenly remember Buffett's saying "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact."

Why not link to the original article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_tim_oreilly_aims_to... ?

> O'Reilly is talking to people, but he's helping people talk to eachother as well. He's introducing officials like Vivek Kundra, the new CIO of the Federal government, and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra to ground-breaking hackers like geek rennaisance man Chris Messina and YCombinator founder Paul Graham.

I was going to flag it as being about politics, but that was kind of interesting to read, and I guess you could say it's on topic.

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