Disposable IT Drives Campaigns

Computerworld - One of the most striking aspects of this year's presidential primary race is the sudden importance given to candidates' IT operations. Everything from elaborate Web sites and aggressive online fundraising to e-mail campaigns and blogs have been embraced by virtually all of the candidates running for president.
And yet while IT professionals might assume that getting a campaign's IT operations up and running is a complex and time-consuming affair, what's most striking about these IT infrastructures is how quickly they're cobbled together -- and then discarded. For better or worse, campaigns live in a world of disposable IT.
"Everything you use didn't exist a year ago," says Mike Liddell, director of Internet strategy for the Joe Lieberman for President campaign in Arlington, Va. "And what you've created was done in a short amount of time and has a short life cycle."
That means concerns about integrating with back-end systems or anticipating the long-term effects of choosing between an open-source technology or a proprietary approach just don't matter, since the life cycle of a presidential campaign is so short.
Unlike most businesses, campaigns have a termination point, says Sean Kewley, vice president of Voter Solutions Inc., a Chicago-based supplier of database and voter analytic software. That's why they don't invest in an IT infrastructure loaded with network switches or high-performance servers. "Why would you, when you know that the organization is going to dissolve on election day?" he asks.
But if the IT organizations are more nimble than their corporate counterparts, they're not necessarily more advanced. Jan Soule, vice president of marketing at Campaign Superstore in San Jose, says she thinks presidential campaigns are far behind on current technology "because they only look at it every four years."
Her company offers Web site templates for candidates running for office, including Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.). With them, Soule says, a candidate can get a professional-looking site for about $1,000 -- a reasonable amount to spend on a system that will simply be cast aside at the end of the election cycle.
Time to Market
Nicco Mele, webmaster at the Dean for America headquarters in Burlington, Vt., says he agrees that long-term IT thinking is detrimental to a political campaign. "What matters is how fast. It's a time-to-market environment," he says. So, like many corporations today, campaign IT organizations turn to outsourcing.
For example, Howard Dean's campaign makes heavy use of streaming video on its Web site but never gave a thought to developing any infrastructure for it in-house. Instead, the campaign relies