Waldo Jaquith

In the Canadian political publication The Hill Times, Amanda Clarke yesterday exhorted the newly formed Digital Transformation Canada to move beyond the frame of a simple merger of five different departments.

In Vital City, Brittany Montgomery argues that New York City needs to overhaul software procurement.

My friend and former Treasury colleague Matthew Burton wrote a great piece about “vendor capture,” in which government—or any client, I suppose—becomes a captive of a vendor.

A few weeks ago I released v1.1 of The State Decoded (a decade after the v1.0 release), and this evening I released v1.2.

In 1997, the band Sugar Ray released a song called “Fly” that featured an intro by Jamaican dancehall DJ Super Cat.

Plug-in solar is having a moment.

I’ve worked remotely since 2012.

I’m very interested in the UK’s new “Insourcing and the Public Interest Test—Guidance Note,” issued by their Cabinet Office (which seems to be roughly equivalent to the White House, in terms of institutional authority), providing a revised framework for m…

I’m halfway through “Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy,” and it’s…alarming.

For the first time ever, the United States generated more power in a month from solar than from coal, in May.

I enjoyed Will Callaghan’s overview of the UK’s Community Fund, a sort of a Kickstarter for local governments to team up to fund building software for their collective benefit.

In the federal government, when buying anything above the simplified acquisition threshold, contracting officers are obliged to ensure that they receive an independent government cost estimate (IGCE) for the thing being procured.

For the past few years, the supermajority of my writing here has been about Agile procurement.

I wrote last week about how it’s a mistake to include detailed deliverables in an Agile software development contract, but let’s throw another mistake on the pile: including a delivery deadline in an Agile contract.

When procuring custom software, agencies commonly make the mistake of contracting for detailed deliverables.

There are a lot of things that I describe as “the biggest cause of failures in government software projects,” so here’s another one to throw on the pile: using capital funding instead of operational funding.

I’m delighted to announce that the State Software Collaborative, which Robin Carnahan and I started in 2020, is growing up and leaving its Beeck Center nest—the Council of State Governments is taking it on as a major new initiative, building and supporting