Let me give you an example of an OIT project I was involved in. UT Libraries (which has its own IT department) was tasked to set up an online thesis and dissertation database that held subsequent theses and dissertations in a searchable format. The project began in 1992 or so. The website says 1997, but it was around much longer. They wanted to get OIT (in this case a predecessor organization but essentially the same outfit) to help. I was brought on board in 1998 or so as the programmer/technology guy. In the preceding 6 years, many meetings had been held but not much headway had been made. They had a web page, policy papers and a mission statement. I went to my first meeting, received my marching orders and proceeded to whip up a prototype -- over a weekend. I later showed off the prototype, which was derived from VPI's software, to a mostly silent meeting. My boss pulled me aside and scolded me for not taking more time. They hadn't worked out the "copyright" and "intellectual property" issues fully. I though he meant the licensing on the software I had hacked, which was copyleft and free to use for non-commercial purposes. No, no, no. The copyright and IP issues with the theses and dissertations. Um, OK. Well let me know when you get that worked out.

I was also told that they had already started accepting documents in PDF form in 1997 (there were extensive arguments for and against PDFs, consuming 2 meetings that I can remember) and that I should have a facility ready to add those files into the database. I told them to give me a timeline and I would be glad to do it. OK. We'll let you know at a later meeting. I never attended another meeting nor was asked to another meeting of the 'steering committee' and after talking with a new boss, I was taken off the project. Later, I found out that UT Libraries had contracted with UMI to do the work (which was an original desire of UT Libraries) and now there is a great service, fully searchable, with hundreds of theses and dissertations publicly available. While I was not a highly paid employee, there were a lot of people involved in the project and a lot of hot air was released over it. It was a waste of time and money. I was disappointed because I wanted to put the project on my resume, but I learned some great stuff and turned that into some freelance money (I wrote some software for a magazine company to move all of their back catalog from Quark to PDF automagically).

Anyhow, I thought this was just an unusual situation, but as I continued at UT I found that the IT department had lots of projects like this just sitting around. I was put on a public key infrastructure committee and that was killed before the first meeting, but not until after it was announced that some of UT's "best" were working toward providing RSA strong security for data.

Later, I moved to another group as a graduate assistant and was put on the wireless internet team, after working on client side support for the wireless network. The guys running that project had negotiated a huge amount of autonomy for their project as a condition of getting it done before any other university on the planet and on a huge scale. The two techs running the project pulled off a stunning coup by doing it on budget, ahead of time and by employing extensible architecture. Man, was that fun. The only hiccups were where the project intersected with the IT Old Guard who were extremely put out by their sideline status in the project. Everyone tried to sink their teeth into the wireless project and if it weren't for the preconditioned autonomy and sheer force of personality of the project leads, the UT IT culture would have eroded that project as well.

I am not bitter about the time I was there as I learned a great deal about IT (and why I didn't want a career in it), but it was definitely an eye opener. There are a bunch of really capable folks there, some of who would be highly compensated in "the real world." They work there for other reasons though and I think the ability to "tinker" with things that would otherwise get you cannned in industry ("Hey, what happens when you bridge with an ISDN line?"). I heard they switched their email system from an excellent UNIX based solution to an MS Exchange service. I think that the new president mandated that exact solution and it would be interesting to hear why he thought that would be better than the homegrown solution that had served UT for many years (usually for no more cost than the hardware it ran on).

True happiness is knowing you are a hypocrite. -- Ivor Cutler

Somehow I imagined that's how projects get run in a big state government bureaucracy*. In googling around, I noticed they seem to have a lot of committees and advisory boards and such. I never saw a committee write one line of code or roll out one server upgrade.

And they not only have Exchange, they are apparently still running Domino(!?). IBM must've had a hella good salesman before they left town.

(*I worked at TVA in IT for about three months. That's how it was there.)

The second thing would be the formation of a series of committees and guidance groups incorporating key stakeholders to study how the cataclysm will affect the organizational charts.

Ah, yes. My favorite part of government and big business.