Earlier this year, the White House announced an initiative to shrink the federal governments overall real estate footprint as a way to shave $3 billion off the federal budget. The initiative covers government-owned facilities of all sorts, including—or, perhaps, especially—Uncle Sams 1,100 data centers.
The announcement of a Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative DCCI was music to the IT industrys ears, and storage giant NetApp immediately commissioned a study to gauge the programs prospects for success.
What NetApp found, probably to its dismay, is that while most federal IT professionals agree that more data center sharing among agencies is a good idea 76 percent, far fewer believe that its feasible for their particular agency to share resources with another 49 percent. Its also the case that everyone knows that the other agencies dont want to give up their own data centers, with 86 percent of the surveys correspondents citing government culture as the number one obstacle to consolidation. In spite of the culture factor, 63 percent of those surveyed were confident that consolidation would happen eventually, but most 74 percent were in agreement that the White Houses timetable is unrealistic.
via Does Uncle Sam really need 1,100 data centers?.
Believe me, after working in and around government for the last ~10 years or so, government culture is the single largest problem and obstacle it must overcome for itself.
The culture is very anti-collaborative and here is why: Job Security.
Every function in government is treated by the people responsible for them as a financial asset of sorts. If you dont use it, you lose it. If you cant justify why you need to have it, theres no need for you to have it. If youre no longer providing value for your part in the overall picture, theres no reason for you to be here.
So what happens? People build false walls around everything they do. They create these false barriers to justify why the government cannot function or succeed without them, even if it means you have to figuratively lock yourself in a corner and thus be less productive, which gets turned around as a justification to need more resources. After all, this is what creates job security.
I [obviously] work in IT in the government sector. I see this all the time – “This is mine, not yours”. “Why should I help them – they don’t help me” or “We are not paid/We are not funded to support this/that”, ”Thats not my job, if they want that done then they need to fund us to do that”, and my favorite “Why do I need to do this? I see no need for it.”
The problem is that this is true, but only superficially. Everyone is empowered to change their own workforce culture and show the leadership how and why it works. The problem is that no one really has the balls, or brains to actually do it.
Most people managing IT in the government that Ive met don’t really have the first clue what they’re doing anyway.
This is both sad and depressing.