Someone Should Teach The Pentagon About Expedia And Travelocity
17th Nov 2006, 08:04 GMT
What is it about the government that they always seem to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on unnecessary computer systems that don't work? The FBI famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a system that never worked at all and had to be scrapped in favor of a new $500 million system that we have little confidence will work very well either. Especially when the FBI doesn't seem willing to use things like Google when they could help. So, it should come as no surprise to find out that the Pentagon's new travel booking system, which they undoubtedly spent millions on, is the type of system that Pentagon employees work to get around using, rather than actually using. A study has found that the system "fails to find the cheapest airfares, offers an incomplete list of flights and hotels and won't recognize travel categories used by the National Guard and Reserves." Instead, most Pentagon employees end up calling up travel agents or do the booking on their own, and then manually enter it into the system. In fact 83% of Pentagon trips are set up outside of the system. Aren't you glad your taxpayer money went to this fancy system that no one actually uses because it can't hold a candle to other options? As with the FBI system, it looks like a case where some defense contractors convinced the deep pocketed government to spend millions on building a system from scratch when they could have just used tools that were already out there and, well, battle tested.
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