Many branches of government including the United States federal government has spent a ton of money developing information technology systems to help promote the job of the various agencies and government. One of the biggest concerns is all the patchware that is being used to allow old software programs, which they have been using for years to work with the latest software programs of today. However, if an old system works fine why change it? If an older system is used to collect data or statistics then once that data is collected and changed into ones and zeros it really doesn't matter if that old program can correspond with the new program or not. Once the data is put into a different format such as a spreadsheet then the new program can pick it up and take it from there. Yet, when they try to make old systems work with new systems all hell breaks loose. Then new code has to be written and there will always be problems. Additionally, the new patchwork codes often cause conflicts in both the old code of the old system and the new code of the new system. Further, this causes security breach vulnerabilities from hackers and those that wish to break the security system. It appears that the information technology folks are making things too difficult and costing the government millions of dollars in overruns trying to develop new systems. The other way to handle this is to simply discard all the old data and start over, as the new systems seem to be more vertically integrated to be able to handle such things. Please consider all this in 2006. |
