Library of Congress Copyright Office wasted $11MM on new Technology

Techdirt received documents detailing gross negligence and incompetence at the office of copyright which resulted in the abandonment of a system to improve copyright recording and reporting at the library of congress.  

Techdirt does a great job of summarizing the findings but the bigger story is the White House's determination to remove the copyright office from the Library of Congress and make the head of the office a political appointment.

Here is some of the write-up from Tech Dirt:

Basically, the ship was almost entirely rudderless when Pallante was in charge. Ask for $1.9 million, spend $11.6 million -- without getting a working system -- and no one seemed to check on any of it.
According to the report, the most basic project management concepts were completely lacking at the Copyright Office. Pages 26 through 28 of the document embedded below should elicit gasps from anyone who's done any kind of project management. I won't detail all of it, but here are just a few highlights:

• No monitoring of the project schedule
• No project budget approval process at all
• No periodic reviews to see if things were on schedule and within budget
• No project management framework at all
• No comprehensive project management plan for the executiion and monitoring of the project.
• No official tracking of scope and schedule changes
• No documentation of departures from planned schedule
• No plan for what staffing was needed for the project
• No analysis of alternatives
• No system requirements baseline
• No system development plan
• No requirements for best practices, customer oversight or acceptance of the vendor
• No technical requirements to ensure user functionality given to the vendor
• No details on deliverables given to the vendor (seriously -- no requirements to hand over the code or any documentation)
• No review criteria
• No defined technical framework
• No security testing