Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism.<p>It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard.<p>There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an ineffective team, but this isn't it.

The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal of the campaign.<p>Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished. Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?

I quite liked the profile of @harper in The Atlantic the other day, even if it was a little too fawning.<p>To me the lesson to be drawn from these articles is that the Obama campaign saw their IT infrastructure as a 'core business unit' and vertically integrated it, whereas the Romney campaign treated it like any other commodity service.<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/?single_page=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t...</a>

Um.<p><i>At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company.</i><p>This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

With all the talk of this being a big data driven election I was surprised to not see Palantir utilised by either party.<p>If I was running for office I would be giving those guys a call.

Wow, he ran his campaign like the ran the companies he destroyed/raided.<p>You have to wonder how this incompetence translated into electoral failure. Maybe a better businessman would have given Obama a challenge.

&#62; In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work.<p>I wonder how many hours that actually ended up being. $12,000 for six months seems like a pittance, but if his job involved showing up on Sunday afternoons and making sure that security patches had been installed Saturday night, that doesn't seem like a bad bargain.

<i>&#62; Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from old friends.</i><p>This is a decent way of having a lot of small groups doing their own thing. It's a terrible way to coordinate an organization as a whole to accomplish a specific goal.

This is probably unfair and biased, but what the heck.<p>If this whole story is true, it seems crazy that this man nearly became president. He was running his campaign as if it was a business that he was trying to wring dry, and it seems he would have run the country the same way.<p>Anybody knowledgeable in IT should have been able to tell him that this approach was a bad idea. I mean, Best Buy's consulting subsidiary? They probably thought Best Buy was a cool place that was "with it" when it came to tech. How clueless can you get?<p>It sure sounds like the Romney campaign's IT was run on "connections" and ideology rather than sound technology. This was probably a good way to run a campaign a few decades ago, but doesn't seem to work as well today.<p>It will be interesting to see how this stuff evolves, anyway. The US presidential campaign cycle is so slow relative to the technology sector that it seems hard to apply lessons from previous elections. The current smartphone revolution was just getting off the ground in 2008, so there wasn't much experience to draw on for 2012. By the time 2016 rolls around, will 2012's experience be similarly obsolete?

Interesting: apparently they paid only $790 for Basecamp, while spending &#62;$1k on Dropbox, &#62;$4k on optimizely/new relic, $20k on salesforce, $1.9k on resumator (?), &#62;$16k on other unknown analytics. Looks like 37signals is severely underpricing it's products (and even then they make tons of money).

sound like there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get an inside position on the next Administration in four years. I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.

The 37Signals allotment was high - did they manage the whole campaign in Basecamp?

Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life. Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.