Everyone seems to be jumping on the story of the Romney campaign’s “Orca” debacle. But it seems to me that this is not really a new story. It’s a story that’s been repeated over and over again thousands of times, in large companies and small, not to mention government agencies.

Tell me that you haven’t heard this one before:

• To begin with, you have a CEO who is a great visionary. (Everyone tells him he is, so he must be.) He doesn’t know much about Information Technology, but that’s OK–you can hire people to handle that.
• The CEO is approached by an IT consultant who proposes a great new system, something that has never been done before, which will run rings around the competition.
• The consultant has never actually developed a system of comparable complexity but the CEO is impressed with his vision. He tells his people to give the consultant everything he needs.
• Because of the great strategic importance of the project the team accepts an extremely aggressive development schedule. It just has to be ready by the drop-dead date. To make it work the team will have to put in lots of overtime and not waste too much time on things like design reviews and extensive testing.
• The consultant creates an elaborate marketing presentation to sell the project to the organization (and maybe to outsiders as well.)
• To simplify the transition they decide on a “Big Bang” implementation. On the deadline date the old system will be irreversibly shut down and the new system will go online.
• Users are given “training” that is basically a rehash of the marketing presentation. They can’t practice with the new system because it isn’t ready yet.
• Result: Profit! humiliating failure.

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Ars Technica has a great analysis of “Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown.” Regardless of your political views, if you are involved in any large IT project this is worth reading.

“Orca” was the campaign’s massively-hyped centralized computer system for managing the get-out-the-vote drive. It was supposed to track the process in real time and shift resources as necessary from areas where Romney was running far ahead to areas where more help was needed–thus running rings around Obama’s more old-fashioned system.

In fact the system was inadequately tested and users had essentially no training. On Election Day it collapsed, leaving the campaign managers flying blind. Given the margin of victory this probably wasn’t enough to change the results the election. (The “ground game” is supposed to be good for a point or so.) Still, it certainly didn’t help.

“The end result,” Ekdahl wrote, “was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.”