NASA CIO Can't Even Find Their Own Directives Online
Keith’s note: If you go to this NASA CIO page “Security Requirements & Policies” you will see that they list all of their directives and memos but you cannot download any of them since there are no links. Lets focus on the first one on the list: “NPR 1382.1A, NASA Privacy Procedural Requirements, July 10, 2013”. If you go to NASA NODIS (NASA Online Directive Information System) and enter the document number the search engine cannot find the document. But if you go to the link 1000-1999 Organization and Administration and search for it manually you can find it. But if you use Google and just cut and paste the title in the search box a link to the document magically appears. So please tell me how much credence you can put on a IT management system or a CIO organization where you cannot even use an official policy policy document search engine to find the documents that governs their own core responsibilities?
The fact that their own search engine works poorly doesn’t shock me. That is internally developed software and they probably didn’t put much money into it. The fact that an external search engine like Google works better is a different matter. That’s embarrassing and also raises the question of why they have their own search engine in the first place. If outside software works better, why not just outsource it?
Perhaps because Google is an odious, intractable, and smarmy monster with a secret algorithm and leaky privacy policy?
Perhaps. Almost certainly because of those search algorithms. Fundamentally, a NASA Office ought to have a huge advantage over Google. It’s their own documents and they are the people who put them on line. Google needs to go out, poke around and find them (or, in practice have an army of bots doing that.) If whatever Google does is able to overcome that disadvantage, then either they are very good at what they do, or NASA’s CIO people aren’t, or both. Actually, my money would be on both.
I agree. Google is the king of search, and maybe the closest thing we have to AI. It’s fairly easy and free of charge to set up a localized Google search and for public records like these it might be the most practical approach. That said, for a set of technical documents like these at least a simple local search engine would be fairly easy to set up.
The underlying difficulty is that IT is valuable precisely because it empowers the individual or small group with information to easily make it available. Unfortunately NASA IT has become so focused on regulations and restrictions that they have made it nearly impossible for user organizations to operate their own web resources and instead turned most IT over to separate contractors and erected barriers between organizations which compile information and the ability to distribute it.
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The search engine in the NODIS Document Library
allows for “keyword” (e.g., flag) or “4-digit classification#” (e.g.,
2810) searches only. Searching on a directive’s type,
4-digit classification number, and 2-digit serial number will generate
NO hits (e.g., NPR 2810.1A). To assist employees with searching for
directives, instructions will be added next to the search field.