Understanding government procurement, with Luke Farrell

About this episode

Patrick McKenzie and Luke Farrell discuss the challenges in government procurement and the inefficiencies in delivering digital services.

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Luke Farrell examine the structural "technical imagination" gap that prevents the US government from delivering high-fidelity digital services. They discuss why states routinely pay full price 29 times for the same buggy codebase, why failure is the default outcome, and why rooms full of government administrators cannot muster the expertise to say a two line code change should be trivial. They also discuss Luke’s work on the "means testing industrial complex,” why the government redundantly pays a private vendor to do a SQL query for information the IRS already knows, and what vendors would say about their own discontents. – Full transcript available here: http://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/understanding-government-procurement-with-luke-farrell/ – Presenting Sponsors: Mercury & Framer If you have more interesting hobbies than managing your money, Mercury Personal is built for you. It allows you to automate movement between accounts—allocating paychecks and tax prep the moment they hit—with a sensible permissions model for partners or accountants. It works the way tech people expect banking to work. Go to mercury.com/personal to experience…

People in this episode

Host: Patrick McKenzie

Guest: Luke Farrell

Topics covered

• government procurement
• digital services
• technical imagination
• means testing industrial complex
• software redundancy
• vendor discontent

Keywords

• government procurement
• digital services
• technical imagination
• means testing
• software redundancy
• SQL query
• vendor issues

Sponsors

Mercury, Framer

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IRS, Choice Financial Group, Column N.A.

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