Post

Dan Hon
@danhon.com

You should know that a big part of 18F's work was to make sure multi-million to multi-*hundreds*-of-millions dollar contracts at fed *and* state level didn't go to shitty enterprise IT consultancies that *repeatedly* delivered tech that didn't work, was late, or didn't even do what it needed to

1.1K reposts4.6K likes

JauntyWunderKind
@jauntywunderkind.bsky.social

Figuring out how to scale your decision making & buying processes! Any sizable government doing anything has many decisions makers all over. Figuring out how to equip folks everywhere to make good choices is hard hard hard. 18F did so so so much, to highlight successful keeping an eye on the prize.

Plucky P
@pluckypurcell.bsky.social

So you mean if I scammed the federal government into buying a bunch of my shitty trucks that underperformed in every way, 18f might have done something about it? I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Evan Weeks
@evanweeks.bsky.social

I did government software contracting for the first few years of my private career after leaving the military, and from what you've described in this thread, it sounds like they were doing their best to solve exactly the problems that drove me to swear I'd never work another government contract.

Evan Weeks
@evanweeks.bsky.social

Problems like too many analysts, middle-management and "leadership" needing to have their names attached to a project in order to be able to claim it, so they all need to move a piece on the board to say they did something, leading to uncontrolled scope creep and chaos as requirements shift daily.

Dan Hon
@danhon.com

Every one of those consultancies (e.g. an easy target is Deloitte -- you can look up what they've been involved in) would blame government for being a bad customer, and 18F were *also* involved in massively improving government's ability to run + manage these services

Dan Hon
@danhon.com

I brought 18F in on its first engagement with a state. They helped us turn around a giant half-billion-dollar procurement in a waterfall RFP into something that was broken up into smaller chunks in < 4 weeks. They stood up user research. They helped assess vendors on what they could *actually* do.

Dan Hon
@danhon.com

They help states check whether consultancies and bidders can do what they say they do -- because many governments lack the experience + capability to check those claims anymore. When people say they were the tip of the spear, they really were.

Dan Hon
@danhon.com

18F is where I met Robin Carnahan -- she was in charge of figuring out how a federal cost recovery org could even *work* with states. Robin would later go on to *run* the GSA in part because she know how important tech is to deliver government that works for the people.

Paul Bowes
@paulmbowes.bsky.social

Which makes it all the more surprising that so many British public sector IT projects here are given - as though inevitably - to the same handful of contractors who have a long track record of failure. Perhaps that's a political failure.

Passim
@passim.bsky.social

These IT consultancies are the literal worst. Absolute garbage for the most part, and incredibly expensive. A bunch of slapdash Azure junk barely held together by bailing wire that has to be thrown out in less than a year. The best stuff I've seen is actually being built in-house.

Sabrina
@areformersadvocate.bsky.social

I’ll be arrested if I don’t pay taxes which may fund people who will kill me extrajudicially. Im a librarian and keenly in some sights. The agencies you mentioned are for normal people, not billionaires or Project 2025. I’d guess that pissed off monopolists.