Imagine you get together a team of really good developers, who really want to help government work better for people, pay them semi-competitively [*], and just task them with building and deploying the software aspects of this system.
Maybe the software is fully delivered within a year, at a cost of $10M? (Excluding non-software costs of this project.)
Then those team members can move on to the next project(s).
[*] I'm thinking: don't pay as much as FAANG, but maybe 50% FAANG-TC, as straight salary. Meaning FAANG mercenary types motivated only by money filter out themselves for you, but it's still doable for top-tier people who want to do beneficial work, with enough income and job stability that they shouldn't be distracted from work by those stresses. You'd really need to keep the hiring bar up, though, carefully hand-picking small teams, and not compromising if your formula is successful. (And be able to say no to agencies want to scale to too many projects in parallel, or to some politician wants to make it a jobs program, or stuff it with patronage/nepo hires.)
I have run consulting before and was thinking of getting back into with a similar arrangement. Having been involved tangentially in government procurement for small software projects, you get first had visibility into how the normal predatory ISVs operate. Their single site licensing cost is from my experience 20-30% below what it would cost to build it yourself. But then you don't own the software and have to pay for ongoing maintenance. It looks cheaper but ends up costing more for worse software.
This whole sector is ripe for getting flipped because every actor in it operates using the same set of greedy rules.
I wouldn't want to have to be playing bidding games against one of the big consulting firms that sometimes bill massively to create disasters.
I'd rather just have more information systems be recognized as necessarily a government core competency, to in-house. And to pay well enough, to hire the best teams for that (without leaning on their altruism/patriotism so hard that they have to worry about money).
I agree, but they often don't have the skills. I do think many states could benefit from something like digital service, where a state level dev shop could supply services to towns and counties.
That was the healthcare.gov rescue team. patio11 was on it.
But the government guys usually aren't looking to do that. They're not trying to build the software. They're trying to make their friends who got them elected rich. And then maybe when they're out after some time, their other friends can run the law team that extracts something from the government which they're no longer part of.
POSIWID baby. You think this is accidental. But it's the way it is on purpose.
This is roughly the Code For America model... there are many other roadblocks other than "ability to build a system" though, for example the pointlessly strict and bloated regulation which is mandatory to follow. Unfortunately it's not quite enough to have good engineers.
Maybe the software is fully delivered within a year, at a cost of $10M? (Excluding non-software costs of this project.)
Then those team members can move on to the next project(s).
[*] I'm thinking: don't pay as much as FAANG, but maybe 50% FAANG-TC, as straight salary. Meaning FAANG mercenary types motivated only by money filter out themselves for you, but it's still doable for top-tier people who want to do beneficial work, with enough income and job stability that they shouldn't be distracted from work by those stresses. You'd really need to keep the hiring bar up, though, carefully hand-picking small teams, and not compromising if your formula is successful. (And be able to say no to agencies want to scale to too many projects in parallel, or to some politician wants to make it a jobs program, or stuff it with patronage/nepo hires.)