Illusory Follies

  Well, I spent the last week in Dallas, TX attending a conference discussing Information Technology in the government. Some neat stuff. It seems like the government is pretty far behind technologically from the commerical sector. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some neat high-tech stuff that occurs in government — especially with regard to custom applications and some very fun hardware. However, they are severly hampered by the beaurocracy that exists and also the insanely paranoid level of security (and the sheer complexity of the security architecture) as well as the conflicting directive to “share information and operate in a collaborative environment”. Yeah — whatever. If all we were protecting was the secret recipe for Coke, I think things would be a lot easier but with the volume of data and the obtuse way that it’s separated and cordoned off, it’s just not being realistic to think that it can be shared.