The Information Sage by Joshua Yaffa

This was more a story about a guy named Tufte who helped the government keep track of stuff.

This is classic working with the government stuff. However, I would rather work with the government than not have a government to work with. Been there done that. In working on the BadgerCare Plus program and that stupid first version of the program where it asked questions of employers that were impossible to answer all the while threatening them with huge fines if they didn't answer. Two and one-half years of that frustrating program, training over 70 people on how to use something that was unusable, countless meetings with the State of Wisconsin and how to better capture the information they needed,  and then finally getting involved with program re-do's only to get laid off and taken away from getting to use the new program when it came on line. This wasn't so much the problem of the State as it was the problem of the communication between the State and it's programmers and the companies that were hired to actualize the data capture (EDS  and then Hewlett Packard). It was crappy at best and horrible at worst, knowing that people's lives were somehow affected by our inability to answer the questions that needed to be answered in order to help them get the health care they needed. In the end, I figured it was--what do you call it--planned obsolescence or something like that--if it was difficult to get the information then it slowed down the process so that less people could be eligible for State provided health care so the State didn't have to cough up the money. How brilliant! In the end HP gets paid no matter what and they don't have to held accountable for a few messy lives that weren't helped. In the end every one can blame it on the government for inefficiency and justify more cut backs in jobs. This is what happens when you privatize government programs. IT DOESN'T WORK!!!!  You don't improve government by thinning it out or getting rid of it. It's like a relationship with someone. You don't hire someone else to come in and take over and try to fix any problems. Sure you can some consultants like Tufte in this article. But like any relationship, you can only improve it by working hard on it yourself and working with the partner to make it better.