Friday, April 25, 2008

ID Cards for Government

Government Executive reports on the latest progress report on giving government employees and contractors fancy ID cards. If I understand, we went backwards from last year. And we're still falling short of Bush's objective. [smile]

Like to point out this line: "Agencies had blamed technical challenges to issuing the cards. For example, agencies had to develop solutions for integrating the IDs with support systems that maintain the data and provide an interface with enrollment and issuance functions."

In other words, your card is only as good as the underlying personnel system. If you don't have a good personnel system, it can't support a good ID card system. That's a small detail that program managers, like Bush (or, to be fair, like Gore before him) don't understand.

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