Our government should NOT invest in this at all. The difference between our government and the governments of the rest of the world is that the citizens of other countries get returns on the investments their governments make, while we generally only get screwed. Any investment our government would make would be strictly for growing American corporations who continually shit on the very people that provide the labor and money that provide these investments.

Wouldn't it be nice to have our government invest billions in tax dollars into this to see American corporations outsource all the I/T work?

 

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Excel is what most people use because the technology to do more is not that good. There are software packages out there that are being sold to try and improve this area but they are still in their infancy IMO and implementing them tends to be rather expensive and the output is still mediocre.


Back 10 years ago a lot of government entities invested heavily into systems that would collect data in a centralized way but getting data back out has always been limited. Government is just at the point over the last couple years of opening this data up to the public. I am only talking financials here btw. Even as this data becomes public the act of actually presenting the data is not impressive.

 

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Healthcare will be hard to outsource but the only thing that would stop government projects being outsourced to a large extent is artificial limits created by government.

 

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Actually the US government both at the Federal level and the state level have massive amounts of work that needs to get done. The way the current process works is that we will get thousands of different projects all doing similar stuff but using different systems. Meanwhile all of the knowledge that is built up by this process will be by the private sector employees or trapped away in some government employee's head.

 

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I didn't mean to kill this thread. Sorry AT.

 

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A quick explanation of how this will work by using an example that I've actually seen. Medical assistance claims in PA used to be handled by EDS. They had an office in Harrisburg that employed a few hundred people. IBM came in and underbid EDS on the contract and took over the processing. About 300 employees came to IBM from EDS. Over a 5 year period, IBM let go of about 275 workers when they moved the programming and processing support to India. There are still about 25 people working on this contract here and 25 Indians here with H1Bs working on the contract. The rest of the workforce for this contract is located in India.

IBM bid so low that they lost money the first two years of the contract when they were bound to keep the EDS employees employed. However, the contract became profitable in year 3 when let everyone know they would no longer have jobs.

This is how it will work. The government will want something done, and the data will be kept on servers here but all the programming and mining will be done overseas.

 

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That sounds about right.


Now repeat it thousands of times for all of the possible projects at the fed state and local levels.


I don't have much of a problem with using foreign labor as a principle. I have a problem with a fragmented approach that fails to leverage and create a strong knowledge base the US government can continue to leverage. The amount of work to be done is so massive it will define multiple multinational corporations for decades.

 

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Depends on the job - a lot of companies like IBM have considerable workforces here and overseas, so saying IBM will outsource everything doesn't make a whole lot of sense.


There are a lot of technical jobs that are open and are not filled because the workforce just doesn't exist in the US. Most colleges teach web programming (Java, C#, etc..) and most new students want to go into web type companies such as google and facebook. So IBM type places that do back-end servers can't find a ton of talent in the US - they have to widen their search to include H1Bs and they have to open places overseas.

Its amazing how humanity is progressing. Wish I was around to see it in a hundred years

 

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