Dept of Health and Human Services spends $146 per month per user for email [pdf]

http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/661829.pdf

by adventured • 12 years ago

95 53 12 years ago

rodrodrod• 12 years ago

Relevant bit (footnote 8 on pg. 4):

  HHS told us that HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for e-mail; that this
  charge covers connect ivity, storage, and other e-mail services; and that this
  charge is independent of the number of e-mails that are sent or received. HHS
  also told us that the Office of the Secretary pays $10.44 per month per
  telephone line, that this charge covers all featu res associated with the
  lines and the phones, and that this charge is independent of the number of
  phone calls made per month. Each phone call, whether local or long distance,
  is charged at a unit cost of $0.014 per minute.

I wonder what the breakdown of the costs is. That number seems way steep.

_wp3r• 12 years ago

If I was to guess a little. -Email Certificate -Outlook License -Online Outlook license -Remote VPN services and remote dialup + support Which is a big pile of money off the top. -Help Desk -Hardware/Cloud storage and what not, probably a small portion.

cdcarter• 12 years ago

Let's all just hope that "connectivity" includes internet access and a workstation for that user as a whole?

a3n• 12 years ago

They probably have specific requirements. They may or may not be worthwhile. They may or may not make sense. But any vendor is going to satisfy those requirements, and charge for knowing, implementing and demonstrating those requirements.

vidarh• 12 years ago

My first question would be what archival requirements they have for e-mail.

Some governments have legal requirements for incoming official mail - whether on paper or electronic - to be printed off and stamped with the time and date, and manually entered into a journal and archived in multiple copies in separate locations for audit and open access purposes. Others may "just" require an electronic journal, but tend to still have very strict requirements on access, and particular security mechanisms to prevent modification of the journal.

Archival requirements can easily make up the vast majority of cost of processing mail if the rules are complicated enough.

Depending on the extent of "unusual" requirements like that, it may not be that bad. In any case, without more details about exactly what is included it's not very easy to assess whether or not the cost is unreasonable...

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Welcome to the world of government contracting. There is lots of money to be made in this area if you know how/who to talk to, and the red tape to jump through. Lockheed, L3 and Northrop, make a pretty penny, along with many many bottom feeders (some hiding behind a shell companies that fit labels like "disable business veteran" owner or other such preferential categories).

It is a multi-billion dollar world, with its own rules, players, business cycles, customers, marketing and so on. You get to use exciting technologies such as Window Vista (still XP up until not too long ago) and RHEL 4 and 5.

colinbartlett• 12 years ago

I had a government customer once. And they had another vendor I met which was "owned" by a woman. But the real operator of the business made no bones about the fact the the entire thing was setup in his wife's name solely in order to enable contracting with said government agency.

re_todd• 12 years ago

Yeah, I know a couple that is "owned" by the woman to get government contracts. She basically does light human resources stuff while her husband runs the business.

cfontes• 12 years ago

I don't live in th US so this is not clear to me.

Could you explain why would they do that?

pbreit2• 12 years ago

I'm sure that kind of stuff never happens in the non-governmental world.

yuhong2• 12 years ago

Yea, in fact governments are a major customer of Microsoft Custom Support Agreements, not only for XP but also for 2000 and NT4 back in the day. Some of them are even public. The UK government has a government wide Windows XP custom support agreement for example.

bananas2• 12 years ago

The MoD still has an agreement with Microsoft to support windows NT4 in a small list of places until 2025 I understand as well. With enough money anything can live forever (apart from humans - yet).

JumpCrisscross• 12 years ago

My first job out of college was at a large investment bank. As a trader, I spent much of my time on the phone. I remember discovering that we paid several hundreds of dollars a month for those lines. The contract was signed in the seventies and nobody had thought to revisit it.

That is a story about how sensible constructs drift apart over time. Splitting costs into line items is difficult and expensive. Sometimes it isn't worth the hassle. If the HHS overpaid for email but underpaid for something else, that is okay for now. Cost-effectiveness should be calculated on the aggregate for complex contracts.

pmorici6• 12 years ago

I can pretty much guarantee that this is some government contracting company taking advantage of the government's quirks to overcharge. Not some oversight in a contract no one has reviewed in 20 years.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

The contract was signed in the seventies and nobody had thought to revisit it.

Or perhaps it hadn't been worthwhile to revisit it?

mschuster91• 12 years ago

Or perhaps it hadn't been worthwhile to revisit it?

With public agencies, big companies, medics and anyone associated with higher salaries comes one thing: consultants and service providers WILL bill you until a normal person's eyes would bleed. Only that in some spheres, a) decisionmakers don't worry about money and b) they don't worry about money even more when you fill them up with tasty buzzwords.

grecy3• 12 years ago

I work for a small Telco.

We charge two state governments ~$10k a month each for ~200 phone lines.

They both pay well over $25k/month for Internet - and it's about 50 5Mbps DSL lines, with capped usage.

This is today.

jagger27• 12 years ago

How are these ridiculous contracts negotiated?

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

Are there any special circumstances with those states?

source99• 12 years ago

Who are they paying $146 / month for email?

jliptzin• 12 years ago

CompuServe

pmorici6• 12 years ago

If you've ever worked for or with the government this isn't shocking news. In fact I also wouldn't be surprised to find that their email is also unreliable.

There just isn't much accountability with these things it's a HUGE problem. I don't know what the solution is.

jeffdavis2• 12 years ago

"I don't know what the solution is."

Not have such a massive federal government that is always spending other people's money?

When people spend their own money, they often find much more efficient use of it.

pmorici6• 12 years ago

Yeah, sure, but we all know it is inevitable the government is going to spend some money so as a practical matter just cutting government doesn't really address the problem of making the remaining parts more efficient.

guelo• 12 years ago

How about electing people that actually want to make the government better instead of the people that say they want to destroy it.

namdnay• 12 years ago

But people are rarely spending their own money: if you cut government, the same work will be done by some random mega-service-corp, with exactly the same waste.

In my experience, waste is a more or less inevitable consequence of large organisations, be they public or private. In both cases, the managers aren't paying out of their own pockets.

pbreit2• 12 years ago

Non-governmental orgs do stupid stuff like this all the time. It's the nature of large organizations.

rdl• 12 years ago

The biggest solution I could see would be allowing more in-house groups to work on projects without huge stigma if they fail.

The success rate for external/contracted projects isn't actually as high as you'd want, but it's generally more politically acceptable for something like that to fail, plus the contractor absorbs some of the de-risking up front in evaluating the bid.

I'd prefer if government had more in-house projects rather than contracting, on the explicit assumption that some of the projects (even most of them!) would be failures -- I don't see a big problem with duplicated work at the early stages, then internal-to-government competition to find the best solution, then rolling it out.

A side benefit of this would be making GS employment more attractive to great people -- it already pays well, is very stable, has great EoE, etc. If I were a minority/female/etc. engineer, and I wanted a workplace with minimal discrimination, government would be a great place -- historically, it was one of the first major employers of black people in white-collar roles in the 1960s-1980s.

The other key area would be an increase in off-the-shelf products, vs. custom implementations, and focusing on off the shelf systems which are commodity. Government is actually quite efficient at purchasing certain classes of items -- GSA gets good prices for "anything someone in 1940 could explain". It just is bad at "systems", and IT in general.

damian2000• 12 years ago

There's some data on the FY2011 contracts available here

http://www.hhs.gov/grants/servicecontractsfy11.html

CSV (a few mb): http://www.hhs.gov/grants/hhsfy11scinventory-c.csv

pmorici6• 12 years ago

Looks like "Lockheed Martin Services" might be the company providing their IT. They have 3 contracts with HHS totaling over $200 million described as, "CONSOLIDATED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE CONTRACT"

http://www.hhs.gov/about/smallbusiness/smallbusiness/pdf/cms...

Edit: It looks like the 200 million is only for IT services for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid so HHS as a whole probably spends even more on IT.

nppc• 12 years ago

Hey startups, stop wasting your time on those crazy mashups and 'Yet another XYZ clone with a twist'.

Try getting a Govt contract or two !

technotheory• 12 years ago

As someone who is working with HHS in their innovation fellowship, I'd like to point out that HHS is very much moving to lower their email costs. I'm not certain the public information available, but much has happened since this information here was published: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/536/3384131/HHS-pacing-its-m...

Any high price for HHS mailboxes is related to the fact that there are several agencies with different rates (NIH, CDC, FDA, ACF, HRSA, etc are all part of the departmental umbrella of HHS) and some likely have different (and not as competitive) rates. My guess is that the rate quoted above is from one of the smaller agencies with a less competitively negotiated rate...but that's only an educated guess because if I knew the exact numbers I wouldn't comment on them publicly.

What's worth noting here though is that HHS is well aware of their costs, and if the procurement documents referenced above are any indication, then they are working to actively address this.

Dept of Health and Human Services spends $146 per month per user for email [pdf]

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