Yet basic computer incompetence still exists. Just ask SolarWinds.
My guess is that the Feds weren’t really able to issue quite that kind of mandate to every small utility in the country, as water utilities are likely a state-regulated issue. So unless the various states mandate that kind of thing, it won’t automatically happen.
And I suspect the cost of setting up a separate network is probably prohibitive for a lot of them if it’s not funded partially by the state.
The voters, ultimately. And most people, IME, really don’t think about their utilities - until something goes wrong.
Of course. Incompetence is common as dirt.
Article says quantity was changed from 100 to 11,100. I wonder if it’s a fat-finger mistake by a water company employee – maybe trying to make a legitimate change (via an illegitimate connection)?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be an employee who’s staying really really quiet right now and hoping this all blows over.
You’d be amazed at the depth of the technical ignorance out there in the wider world once you get outside of technical circles, and at the semi-competence of many ostensibly technical people in the industry.
I’m not at all surprised that a dinky town of about 15,000 in the Tampa area wouldn’t have the best IT talent in the area. They probably don’t pay well and they probably aren’t doing anything interesting technologically. And I suspect that larger towns/institutions in the area probably have more of both for the people interested in public sector IT.
No, I would not be amazed by either. I deal with it all the time. Hell, I’ve probably been it once or twice when I was new.
What I don’t do, is excuse it, though. It’s incompetent and it should be called out - even it was a town of 150.
Many of the posts in the New And Unimproved Workplace Rants thread, including some very current posts, give testimony to this. (e.g., the people who send screen shots of text that they want somebody else to put into a web site, not understanding that you can’t cut-and-paste text from a screen shot.)
That certainly seems like a plausible hypothesis.
In many municipal settings the resources / requirements mismatch is so severe that the idea of getting three Teamviewer accounts for the three water system techs is simply a non-starter.
It’d take a year’s wrangling and a vote of the City Council to approve the funds to buy 2 more subscriptions. So it just doesn’t happen.
“Normalization of deviance” becomes just “ops normal” when workers and organizations are trapped with must-do work in the face of pervasive not-enough resources.
I suspect a lot of it is the scale of the cash outlays; I work for a city in IT, and deal with our water department in particular, and we’re big enough that something like Teamviewer would be a “Oh… sure, just put in a PR for that” type expenditure, since it’s under 50k and doesn’t have to go before city council. It would have to be approved by the higher-ups, but something like that wouldn’t probably get much static if it was really necessary. And chances are, we probably already have something that does that, and adding a few more licenses is not so expensive or a big deal.
But smaller outfits have smaller budgets, and I suspect for somewhere as small as Oldsmar, much smaller expenses get more scrutiny.
On an aside… companies with plenty of money tend to view IT as a force multiplier of sorts- they realize that it’s something that while it doesn’t make money, it enables the making of more money elsewhere. But cash strapped and/or stingily-minded outfits tend to view IT as a necessary, but regrettable black hole of cash. They usually are too busy fixating on the expense side of IT to be truly aware of how it can help them.
I suspect that smaller cities like Oldsmar tend to fall in the latter category- when all sorts of enterprise-level IT tools cost five and six figures, the temptation to nickel and time every expenditure and short-change it and/or take chances has to be huge.
A city that can’t afford $80/m for essential software is a city that needs to rethink its own existence.
Not that it’s essential - RDP is built into Windows, FFS.
The US’s anti-local tax mindset is hard to fathom. There are so many things they have to do by law and there is simply no requirement that the public be willing to vote to approve the tax income necessary for the city to comply with the city’s regulatory compliance obligations.
Making the city government disappear doesn’t fix anything. The same services would then have to be provided by the next level up. With no more money for that either.
I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
There are all too many people with the attitude of Grover Norquist. This is the result when it is put into practice.