"Standards of Excellence"

I'm sure they can hire some consultants to explain it to us...

rev. by: Fred Morris

rev. date: 18-Nov-2005

Where to begin? I don't know. Where am I going with this? Don't know that either. What I do know is that we're stuck here in the middle somewhere.

The State of Washington has all of these information technology standards and I've read a boatload of them, corresponded with numerous people, been to meetings and seminars, read RFP/Q/Is, been to pre-bid conferences, filed public information requests. I've been in IT for 20 years, I believe strongly in things like standards; I believe the public sector has an important role to play in creating and promulgating standards.

We are at a point where the government is under great pressure to be more open and accessible. The debate shouldn't be about whether or not the fine intentions are worth-while: they are.

A veritable symphony of incidents and encounters in the recent past which have juxtaposed the fine words which are expressed with what actually gets served up (double entendre intentional) have, shall we say, caused me to entertain some grave reservations.

What you will see below is the result of change: done poorly, with inadequate insight, with insufficient general understanding, and perhaps disregarding the ultimate intent of the exercise. They don't suggest answers, but perhaps they suggest that it is worthwhile to ask some questions about how implementing technologies are chosen, who is doing the work, and why they are doing it the way they are.

In spite of all of the purported oversight, the metrics which would track the sorts of problems illustrated below at the level where statewide oversight occurs are notable by their absence. Let me repeat myself in case you missed the point: somebody at the State oversight level should be collecting all of these defects, and I should be able to go somewhere and see statistics by technology, implementation team, agency, etc. As someone remarked "..the wheels of government grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.." and what comes out the other end isn't always, it seems to me, what we, the people paid for or have a right to expect.

I should also point out that I actually expect applications to work in a secure environment (mine as well as theirs), and when that expectation is not met my inclination is to attempt to make it work rather than "spread 'em wide".  These examples fell in my lap when all I was doing was simply trying to coax uncooperative services to perform as intended or advertised. So, your experience may be quite different than mine.

I'll put some pithy comments as an introduction to each item in this gallery. There are a lot of things which I'd like to include here, but which don't boil down to a simple snapshot or cut and paste.

I invite comments or maybe even submissions. Please indicate whether or not I have your permission to publish your comments.

• Department of Information Services / Information Services Board
• General Administration
• Public Disclosure Commission
• City of Seattle: Here to Serve Our "Customers"

Department of Information Services / Information Services Board

DIS and the ISB are the entities which create all of the technology standards for the State of Washington. This isn't just some bureaucratic brain fart, it is mandated by the Revised Code of Washington which means that it is the result of legislation and passed into law.

The DIS and ISB web sites are the body of knowledge of all such standards for government, vendors and the public at large. In 2005 they whacked their existing web site in order to make the information more easily accessible and maintainable. In order to do so they converted a large number of HTML documents into the proprietary  Microsoft Word format (instead of the other way around); they also moved numerous documents and combined and separated out documents seemingly at will. As a result of this, a lot of the old documents cannot be found: the concept of a Uniform Resource Locator and the principles of document management do not seem to be well-understood.

What seems to be lost in all of this is the notion that things should work simply, and simply work. The HTTP standard has an error code reserved for Document Not Found; it also contains (non-error) status codes for Redirect and Redirect Permanent and there are associated semantics, the intent of which is to provide cross-referencing information when documents are moved, superseded or relocated, as they will certainly be from time to time.

But these people had to reinvent the wheel and did a really good quality job... By the way, where has that document gone? "sad"? Yah, I guess so.

m3047@hera:~/.kde/share/config> telnet www.dis.wa.gov 80
Trying 198.239.150.118...
Connected to www.dis.wa.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /isb/coresystem/trends.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: www.dis.wa.gov

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Length: 2282
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:16:48 GMT

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript">
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    var field = location.href;
    document.write(location.pathname);
    location.href="MapHtm2Aspx.aspx?404=" + location.pathname;
// -->
</script>
</head>
<body>


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General Administration

The arrogance and conceit capable of being displayed by these folks is effected with such aplomb that it simply comes across as the way that government is supposed to work! Not that I'm entirely without sympathy for their real predicament: I really do get the impression that they're not bad people, that it's the way they're required to behave. They can be quite personable and even helpful one-on-one.

I found the following while trying to report that one of the State's mailservers was sending e-mail with borked mail headers. I reported this error as well. It's remained unfixed for quite a while now.

As Peewee Herman said: "I meant to do that!"

Public Disclosure Commission

You are supposed to be able to get information from these people about how much money candidates for public office raised, who gave it to them, and where they spent it. Unfortunately portions of the web site are unusable (it appears someone is dabbling with Ajax) using a generic and reasonably modern browser; there is no justifiable reason why it should only work with Internet Explorer. Where a simple REST interface on top of a service oriented architecture would do, they've done a serviceable job (I was able to download raw data).

The app (presuming that there actually is a working application underneath that steaming pile of squirming JavaScript) was so borked when I persisted after its petulant and misguided refusal based on my use of the wrong browser that it was impossible to scoop it up and put enough wax on it to present it to you, but the feedback page (or was that an error handler?) finally expelled this gem.

City of Seattle: Here to Serve Our "Customers"

This sort of thing isn't limited to the State of Washington.

The feckless bureaucrats who serve this up won't provide an actual URL for this wonderful bit of double-speak which explains why "e-Government" is so great for government: Because nobody has to be accountable: they can blame whatever happens, even nothing at all, on the computer!

The colorization is mine, for emphasis. (No, I am not some jobseeker who was turned down for a job.)

Did the City's legal department sign off on this?

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