Talk:Bureau of Land Management

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[edit] PR language

This article incorporates text from the BLM website, and it shows. Parts of this article seem very PR-ish, such as this whole paragraph:

Perhaps one of the Bureau's greatest challenges today is to develop more effective land management practices, while becoming more efficient at the same time. The BLM has taken significant steps to reduce administrative costs, streamline work processes, focus on customer service, and improve accountability to the American people.

This effectively says, in forward-looking-go-get-em-optimistic marketing style, that the BLM does its job. Well, one would hope so. Also, while the beautiful images are nice, I don't think they add as much to the article as, say, a map of BLM-held land would. -- Scott eiπ 10:15, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Well it's our best source of info. And if it's not NPOV at least it's not attacking anyone. --M1ss1ontomars2k4 04:56, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
That doesn't mean we have to adopt their wording. Besides, there are those out there who beleive that the BLM should not exist, and its lands should be realeased to private owners. They might consider a glowing article to be "attacking" them. I would also like to point out that the article at present is much more neutral then it was back in December. -- Scott eiπ 19:45, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Winners never quit and quitters never win - but when you never quit and never win there is something wrong. After nearly seven years of working for BLM and DOI in the area of business and IT architecture I was able to see the first-hand serious problems that permeate these parts of the Federal Government. Taxpayers would save lots of money if Federal Land were handed to the Nature Conservancy for management. If you ever saw an old western with the crooked Indian agent in it - he was working for DOI. The Cobell lawsuit against DOI hopefully will be resolved in favor of the Indians. There are billions of dollars missing in oil and gas and mineral royalties owed to the Indians by DOI. DOI's Internet access has been shut down by Judge Lambert many times now. The sad truth is the attacks on DOI information is not coming from outside the DOI but from ignorant employees who lack training.

If one works for the NSA, CIA, Dept of the Army, etc. one can get tuition reimbursement from ones employer. Advanced degrees are encouraged at these agencies and departments. When one works for DOI one can not get tuition reimbursement because DOI worries that once one has an education one will find another job. This arrested mindset permeates DOI and all its bureaus. In house software developers at BLM created an electronic system for employees to enter their daily time card data. Engineering reviewed their approach and the developers were advised to monitor their network usage for the application. The project manager had a fit at the suggestion. This is just common sense for any project that makes use of a WAN resource. A few weeks before deployment the developers had determined that a single user would transact 10 megabytes of information just for a single time card! Engineering had to step in at the last minute and contract a Lotus Note application developer to re-factor the application. The WAN was a confederation of fractional T1/frame relay lines and could not handle the traffic of an inefficient application. The taxpayer pays daily for this lack of education on the part of DOI employees.

DOI faces a serious challenge in leadership, asset management, information management, security, chain of custody systems and other areas but lacks an organizational architecture to stop wasting money and implement changes necessary to cut costs. One specific situation involved the need to inventory computers across the BLM specifically and across DOI as well. BLM spent over 6 million dollars implementing Tivoli enterprise management across 147 sites. The system provided two inventories before the system was sabotaged by the system administration employees systematically across the BLM. This became known as the 6 million dollar scan or to some of us as the 6 million dollar SCAM. The system administrators wanted to continue the existing system of doing "data calls" across the state offices. This approach, of course, allowed them to "cook" their data reporting. The final nail in the Tivoli coffin was driven by a Windows administrator at NIRMC in Denver decided he wanted to deploy a Microsoft SMS solution. BLM was spending around 60 million a year on system administrator labor when they could have centralized their IT and drastically cut administrator labor.

Check out http://www.indiantrust.com/ to get the truth about DOI. Godzilla1138 04:46, 28 April 2007 (UTC)