So a friend of mine, Matthew Weaver, was assigned to go help a team at Raytheon who had a contract with the Air Force to do, essentially, the next generation of software for satellites that enable Global Positioning System, G.P.S. So something that’s pretty important to all of us, especially people like me who need it all the time.
And when he got there, he found that one of the big things that was hanging them up was that they had to get the data from the satellites to the ground stations. And there’s a very industry standard way of doing this. It’s the obvious way you would do it. But instead, the team had inserted this thing called an Enterprise Service Bus, or E.S.B, which technical people will know was something that was really popular in the ’80s and ’90s. But it’s a big, clunky piece of software.
And it was kind of creating this Rube Goldberg machine that made the data go from the normal, the easy protocol into this crazy mess of code and then back out again. And it would time out. You couldn’t get the data from one place to the other in time. They’d spent months on this and they couldn’t figure it out.
And he’s like, why are we using this E.S.B. when this other protocol would work fine? It’s a requirement in the R.F.P. that the Air Force had put out.
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So Raytheon can’t take it out because they say, no, the Air Force is requiring us to do this. Why is the Air Force requiring it? Because the Department of Defense requires it. Why does the Department of Defense require it? Because there’s something called the Federal Enterprise Architecture that requires it.
The story of the Federal Enterprise Architecture goes back to this Act called Clinger Cohen, that was I think 1996, where Congress said we need to get a better handle on digital. We’re not doing technology well in government. Let’s make every agency create a plan. And then let’s have those plans be coordinated. And the Federal Enterprise Architecture was the attempt to coordinate those plans.
So one of the things they put in there was that things need to be interoperable. And they offered in there, as an example, this very common type of software at the time — Enterprise Service Buses — as an example of how you might get things to be interoperable. They weren’t actually a great idea at that time. They were already kind of becoming sort of obsolete. Essentially, Application Programming Interfaces — APIs — that run the internet now took them over.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-jennifer-pahlka.html