To the Unknown Politician:
Thank you for facing up to the potentially harrowing task of running for public office. People do it for all sorts of motives, but just to do it sets you apart as a special breed... or someone horribly driven by circumstances.. or both. It's not something your average person wants to do. Since you're contemplating doing it, or maybe you've already done it and not only have the flies been really bad the last few days, but the horse polishers just came to your door, and so you're naturally trying to decide: Where do I stand? What are the issues? How do I distinguish myself and gain traction?
Current sole-sourcing practices in information technology highlight two truths often ignored in the content free, frictionless world of corporate and government communications:
Evidence can be seen every day in spite of monoculturization/sole sourcing: Voting systems with huge innate flaws; Incredibly stupid oversights such as government agencies sending e-mails with invalid headers, and feedback web pages with servers which fail when said headers are cut and pasted into the comment fields. Many more defects are noted, but reciting a litany of them just obscures the real issue: the same bone-headed, incredibly stupid things keep happening again and again, sole-sourcing has not eliminated them.
Sole-sourcing would seem to offer standardization; however it suffers from a marketing imperative to violate sound and accepted engineering practices to further vendor lockin. That's the simple part. It's also the part which is most vociferously contested and objected to, and there's a reason for this:
Experience with information technology is actively discredited; tieins to union-busting and age discrimination cannot be ignored. To put it another way: a bachelor's degree or higher in horse polishing doesn't inform as to what horses are good for or what the operational parameters are for the equine system.
It shouldn't require a bachelor's degree be taken seriously when one makes the observation that one end of the horse is smelly and best avoided. But more importantly experienced people aren't all that interested in polishing horses, they're interested in doing useful things with them; they also realize that they need to be fed, and that the smelly stuff is a natural byproduct of the operation of the equine system (one fears that the horse polishers would take the short-sighted view that the best expedient is instead not to feed the beasts). In fact, a lot of experienced people simply don't care about the horse's wax job: a trait which the degreed horse polishers point out with great glee and dire warnings... that is, when they're not complaining about the mangy horses these experienced people keep breeding that just won't wax up right since they refuse to license the horse wax consortium's special waxability gene: so maybe you could just pass a law requiring licensing of the gene since they were so nice about contributing to your campaign?
Experience says that key practices are peer review, clearly defined interfaces, and measurable practices... lessons which extend beyond information technology. These are lessons which are constantly elided to the detriment of the common good by content-free, frictionless communications.
These key practices were pioneered by government which had a responsibility and imperative which could not be avoided. Naval shipbuilding, munitions manufacturing and aircraft were the prime disciplines in which generally accepted engineering standards were developed. Simultaneously, evolving electronics and computing systems became ever more critical and essential to the safe and proper functioning of such large, complex systems (and others, such as particle beam accelerators).
Government addressed these issues by fostering open standards, nurtured by government-sponsored technology initiatives which were not exclusively licensed to for-profit corporations. We still own a lot of these technologies and practices in whole or in part, in fact many of them still haven't been fully implemented (or are being ignored and even cast aside by corporations whose primary purpose is to maximize their own profits); we don't have to disregard them as a society simply because various profit hungry and ethically challenged entities have decided that having them adopted and their furtherance continued as government policy is not in their immediate best interests, and we ignore this undermining of the public interest at our continued public expense and peril.
Put poison in a bottle with a pretty label, back it up with a flashy marketing campaign, and many Americans will gladly drink it and complain mightily if the government interferes. But that can be counteracted by a suitably-informed counter-campaign (which will not be developed on some public 'blog).
We dare not continue to cede development of these technologies and the intellectual capital behind them to the horse polishers and horse wax manufacturers.
If we do, then eventually they'll forget about feeding the horses (they'll have a good reason for this, not that anybody will be able to actually understand the white papers and business process patent filings) and they'll all die... and the horse polishers will be knocking on your door, decrying the fact that it happened and how tragic it is that all of that pension fund money which was invested in horse wax manufacturers has just somehow evaporated... and if only you could fund Horse 2.0, they'll make it newer and better, they promise, and who are you going to believe, your buddies the horse polishers with the degrees, or those stupid people who kept feeding those horses and getting them dirty in the first place (which is of course what really caused them all to die)?
Of course, you have to admit that the public was absolutely in awe of all of those shiny horses.. at least up until the point where they died and the polishers couldn't slather on the wax fast enough to keep the flies away.
Meanwhile, you're hoping that the general public doesn't notice that horses were actually useful for something once upon a time.
This issue transcends political parties and is up for grabs. Are you willing? What are you going to do now?