Doing less with less

      My department spends millions of dollars on software for
          urgently needed functions.  They don't do any systems
          analysis, and build them by accretion.  They are
          extraordinarily difficult to use, and people who have
          trained themselves in Lotus and dBASe, and love computers,
          can't figure them out.  A complex system that works is by
          definition an expansion of a simple system that works, but
          they don't even do that.

          They don't work.  When we complain, we are told that the
          only problem with the system is our complaints, and to make
          it work.

          Computers are the wave of the future.  We have to get
          familiar with them.  How many managers don't even know how
          to turn them on?

          I heard one software developer say that he needed to change
          the graphic on a program he was developing, cost-plus.  He
          said he needed a graphic of Uncle Sam shovelling money into
          a furnace.  My department paid Martin-Marietta IBM prices
          for Hyundai computers.

          A GS-15 Management Information Systems person in my
          Department has the unique ability of being able to fix a LAN
          so it won't work, and of crashing LAN's.  He burned out a
          $6,000 fileserver doing something he was specifically told
          not to do.  Several computer people had to work weekends to
          fix a major problem he caused by not mapping his LAN menus
          corectly.  He managed to erase information in a database
          which took 8 people 2 years to gather, and have no backups.
          He routinely blames temporary employees for his mistakes.

          I am held accountable, and expected to perform.  Why is this
          not also true for management personnel?