>From Jed:
> Mizuno informed me that the Japanese government agency NEDO has issued a > Request > for Proposal (RFP) for projects in cold fusion. The date is 2015, title > "Energy / Environment > New Technology Program" > > http://www.nedo.go.jp/content/100754489.pdf > > Item D4 on p. 13 here apparently refers to cold fusion: > "Phenomenon analysis and methods of control of the new thermal energy source > from metal hydrides." > > Mizuno thinks it is a day late and a dollar short. I remember seeing lots of RFPs whiz through my mailbox when I was still working at Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation. As a government agency, I would imagine there are reasonably strict rules in place in Japan just as there are here in the U.S. pertaining to the management of taxpayer's money, i.e. who gets it, and how much of it do they get to play with. In my experience there often seemed to have been a never-ending struggle between awarding a RFP to an outside company who seemed like they actually knew what they were talking about versus going with the lowest bidder. Mix that volatile mixture up with an influx of new inexperienced managers who themselves are ignorant of the systems they inherited from experienced employees and managers who either retired or got fed up and left to save their own sanity, and in my experience that means you end up with a lot of RFPs that generate lots of CRAP. Case in point: The EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) I got hired on to help maintain back in 1997 on a mainframe system at Wis. DOT is still in place today. In software terms, a system that was installed around 1995 has now become a horribly antiquated time-bomb that should have self-destructed years ago. It is constantly in danger of dying a permanent death with every minor IBM mainframe O/S s/w upgrade, which typically occurres every 6 to 12 months. Employees and managers came and went, and I somehow managed to survive the carnage of three still-born RFPs assigned the task of migrating the system over to a new server. As they began to process the fourth RFP attempt I plotted my final departure. I recall meeting with some of the new outside contractors. I did my best to assemble a multi-page chart containing Database Tables and their relationships with each other. I linked these tables with numerous SPUFI commands that showed how to extract (export) the front end table structures that in-turn pointed to the actual document objects. I recall being profusely complemented with the amount of exquisite detail I had supplied them with. (I guess having a BS in ART and an AD in Data Processing assisted me in creating pretty looking graphics that occasionally revealed useful information.) What their complements suggested to me was the disquieting suspicion that they, themselves, were not as knowledgeable of the ancient system as they claimed they were in the RFP that was awarded to them. All my charts and graphs showed them was how to migrate the FRONT END table structures. It didn't show them how to migrate the actual OBJECTS, the actual documents (scanned or electronically produced) that our users would need to display on their monitors such as citations, insurance letters, and traffic accident reports. The only person who has a clue as to how to do that is working in another government building on the other side of Madison, and he has been told not to give any assistance to our contractors. Presently, I believe there still exists three individuals left within the state within our immediate vicinity who possess actual knowledge of how the system works under the hood. Only two of the three work at DOT. Only one of the two employees at DOT is still tasked with the responsibility of maintaining the viability of the 1995 system. Incidentally, the state employee who works on the other side of Madison was previously assigned to assist us in prior RFP attempts. At one point I recall he spent about six months digging into the nuts & bolts of the inner workings of out EDMS system in an attempt to construct a consistent and reliable migration procedure. He reported back that even with his vast knowledge he discovered there were orphaned documents, documents that could not be accessed via a batch migration procedure. These were orphaned documents that our users could ironically access on their monitor screens manually one-at-a-time, but that an automated batch oriented migration system for some strange reason was incapable of accessing. We are talking about a system containing millions of document OBJECTS that need to be migrated. That implies there must exist a lot of orphaned documents we can't access via a batch system. He told us he needed to spend a lot more time trying to work out a better procedure to access these documents. So, what do our newly hired managers decide to do when faced with this fact? Apparently, they dismiss the ramifications supplied to them from the most experienced veteran technologists and instead generate another RFP and go outside the system looking for outside help. Obviously an outside team of contractors must know a whole lot more the system than our own veterans do. And if the contractors fail, well, they are just contractors. They are not permanent staff that we are obligated to pay health insurance and retirement benefits to. We'll just go ahead and hire some more temps. So, now that I am just another tax payer who wonders how his tax dollars are being spent it will be interesting to see how this latest RFP attempt goes. I still have a few contacts working inside the building that occasionally give me little bits and pieces here and there. I hate to say this, Jed, but based on my own experience I'm inclined to speculate that Mizuno's assessment of the viability of the RFP tasked with initiating useful CF projects may be fairly accurate. I hope I'm wrong. Dead wrong. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson OrionWorks.com zazzle.com/orionworks
