After spending more than a combined decade and costing well over $800 million, the United States military is scuttling two newly completed software projects. Reuters first reported last week that the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force had been set to see the work completed on a software overhaul for their respective “antiquated human resource systems.”
Instead of the work being completed, the programs are being canceled, with the work put on hold. The rationale is to allow other firms, notably Salesforce and Palantir, to compete for similar projects. It has been suggested that this amounts to “a costly do-over,” one that is entirely unnecessary given how far along the projects were when they were canceled.
“This is a puzzle to those of us on the outside looking in, and it would help the tech community if someone would pull the curtain back to let us see more for ourselves,” explained Dr. Jim Purtilo, associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.
Change of Priorities?
However, the fact that the upgrade had been going on for a combined 12 years also suggests it may not have been on the right track, and that a restart could be necessary.
“This could be a legitimate management decision to prioritize development of a system that reflects today’s practices more effectively than might have been captured in requirements first formed years ago,” Purtilo told ClearanceJobs.
“On the other hand, the system is pretty much completed, the money has been spent,” Purtilo added.
For now, the services won’t have the modern system they need, and instead, taxpayers may be on the hook for an even more expensive system to be started from scratch.
The Long Haul
It should be noted that the still-in-progress software upgrade was developed long before the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models. Starting from scratch could allow such technologies to be integrated.
Yet, this does serve as a reminder that the government contracting, approval, and execution cycle can be excessively long.
“Typically, projects like this in the private sector, if successful, go from proposal to implementation over a couple of years, not decades, and often that is considered too long,” said technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. “Technology is moving very rapidly at the moment, making it very likely a decision made two years ago would be made differently today, let alone a decision made a decade ago.”
Even as the cause of this switch is questionable, the goal to speed up the process, given the rate of technological change, may be a good one, Enderle told ClearanceJobs.
“The DoD needs to accelerate this process so that it takes months, not years, because, as it is, the U.S. is falling farther and farther behind the technology curve and the result is they are implementing technologies that are overly expensive and underperforming due to obsolescence,” Enderle continued.
Transparency Is What Is Needed Now
The most significant concern is why the projects were canceled, besides just ensuring that the two other firms could be involved. Accenture had won the contract to expand the HR platform in use with the Air Force in 2019, where it would enhance software previously developed by Oracle.
As recently as this past April, it was described as being on track, but it was then put on a pause at the end of May. According to Reuters, officials wanted to steer a new HR project to Salesforce and Palantir.
Likewise, the Hawaii-based Nakupuna Companies has been working since 2022 to integrate a payroll and personnel system into Oracle’s NP2 software. That program also faced cancellation in May and is now in limbo.
This has put into question whether there are other reasons at play than just delays or lack of progress, which wasn’t an issue.
“Perhaps the move would appear in a different light had the regular federal reviews exposed technical issues or gross overruns, but I’ve seen no mention that anyone thought these projects were anything but on track,” said Purtilo. “Without transparency, the cancellation of a viable project…won’t turn down the political heat at all.”
Even as the software deals with pretty ordinary business processes, HR and related, it only becomes a challenge due to scale. Yet, big corporations deal with these things every day, and the federal government is no different.
“The administration could do the community a great favor by opening the records as a case study,” suggested Purtilo. “Those of us whose research deals with system architecture and dev processes never have enough examples of substance for study. Understanding what fundamentals went south in this project would let us inform the procurement of potentially thousands of other systems that are still in the pipeline. Sooner is always better than later for improving one’s system – and it would be nice to know if that was indeed the motivation for terminating the present project.”
