Re: [xml-dev] XML As Fall Guy

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Thu, 2013-11-28 at 09:12 -0600, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
[...]
> I suspect the fundamental issue at the heart of healthcare.gov and a lot of
> government projects (by no means just in software development, or just in
> the U.S. Federal Government) is the reliance on outside vendors instead of
> developing qualified in-house teams and talent. 

This is a general problem that seems to stem from a confusion about what
is a core competence and what is a secondary cost centre.

We see it in software companies outsourcing their core development teams
to a different country (or continent), with the result that those teams
are no longer in contact with markets and customers and can no longer be
creative about their approaches; we see it in publishers outsourcing
ebook production and then suddenly discovering they don't know how to
make the one thing people want from them; we see it with support and
service companies outsourcing call centres and then wondering why
customer satisfaction ratings plummet... or with manufacturing or even
food production... we see it at all levels of society and business and
government...
>  But privatization and outsourcing of core
> competencies is far from the most cost effective approach imaginable.

+1

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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