Battletard wrote:
What works, what doesn't? How can we maximize efficiency while spending less money? Do we really need to pay Lockheed Martin $150 million to develop a jet fighter, and then scrap the project halfway through leaving Lockheed Martin with $150 million, and us with no fighter jet, and up Shit Creek with no paddle, or canoe for that matter.
The Air Force spent $200M over 10 years trying to get a company (Accenture[?] and their sub-contractors, I think) to redevelop some of their internal software to make it more user friendly and modern. The old software was developed over 30 years ago and was used to bridge between multiple systems... kinda to provide a single-entry go-to portal that can query all 'databases' at once... it really is a huge system. Anyways, the Air Force never got their deliverable, they're still using their old software (which is all run in a DOS-like window), and they have no intention of upgrading in the future since they wasted $200M on nothing.
From what I understand, the DoD gave the biggest chunk to Accenture[?] and divied up the rest of the work to dozens of smaller contracting agencies; Accenture then sub-contracted their chunk of the work to a bunch of other people. Since such a large split of work and contract didn't work very well this has been one of the reasons why most of the big-name contractors are getting high-dollar awards from the AF and the smaller guys get noting (but subbed to the big-names). The big-names have a greater reputation, a larger bench-stock and greater resources so they can charge the government top dollar.
Some of my friends are billed to the government at a rate of $120-150/hr (for high level programming), where they only see a fraction of that (maybe 30-40%), so the company get's to pocket the rest. Kinda crazy...
