I consider them closer to SAP than the usual DC area style contracting company. What does distinguish them from most of the companies in the area though is that their product tends to work and scale somewhat which I can't say for the vast majority of government contractor produced software for the government at their (very, very schizophrenic and oftentimes misleading) direction. Actually hiring engineers that can codifies instead of asking for a clearance first makes a monumental difference in how you structure your company and lines of business. It lets you at least create a working project first because you can actually reject most of your candidates instead of being pressured to due to being jerked around by the terms of the contract requiring certain levels of clearance first. The government isn't run by completely retarded people and they're seeing now how it's probably easier to have actual software companies produce software and then go through the integration and compliance paperwork later - it's how GovCloud fundamentally became an option in Intelligence Community projects. You thought the Terremark cloud was one nobody used that's terribly overpriced? Wait until you see the "clouds" the big defense contractors came up with at orders of magnitude more dollars (most of it probably going to compensate those poor people filing documents and paperwork meant to protect the government but now entrapping it to work primarily with parasitic companies).
Look online for people with DCGS on their profiles, you'll be able to trace it all back to trying to reproduce Palantir down to the web GUI. Some decent journalist should be able to piece a lot together if they just trolled LinkedIn. A lot of it is unclassified but technically FOUO so not quite cleared for public consumption. The reason I figure it hasn't been researched thoroughly is because it's extremely boring DC area "tech" news that is more about topics that are of little interest to the tech community and is boring even by DC tech standards. Almost every company here is some Big Data bullshit company that's writing something about 8 - 14 years behind private industry timelines from an engineering standpoint and held back by politics, funding, and sheer disorganization endemic to enterprises but especially bad in the bloated Pentagon budget.
being lax with vetting has cost TLA's a lot but then police forces are second tier players.
And the actual codfiying isnt hard it undersatning the domain problem and how to apply the verious tools.
Having engineers that will want to work in this area and can pass the citizenship requirements is harder back in the day in the UK noprmaly all 4 gradparents had to be citizens from birth for DV (TS)
Dismissing coding from being "difficult" makes sense to most of us on HN that are somewhat competent. However, most of us haven't experienced truly terrible programmers that are very commonplace in big corporate and government shops (this is changing as we finally start adopting platforms at least semi-interested programmers pick instead of "I need a job" programmer types). At a point, if your engineers are so slow and unproductive even without the typical hoops of enterprise dysfunction, it is a bigger problem than if you don't have someone that knows the business well. Good engineers can be misled by just bad business requirements for a while and pivot back around quickly because their code is far, far easier to refactor, re-architect, and reframe. Most enterprises treat programmers (due to their cultural DNA of massive, over-managed projects like in big construction projects) like assembly line workers where output and skills mostly only differ by age and individual skill is not a significant factor (it's part of how we keep seeing houses constructed by low-skill labor despite many higher skilled, probably more efficient skilled laborers present yet constantly unemployed or underemployed). Better programmers also translates to less ugly hacks and better long-term solutions and designs as well (I said better, not more clever). And lastly, they can just plain code away some terrible hacks for the sake of a demo to keep everyone paid if the situation calls for it. Business domain rules and systems being very people-driven typically (by virtue of the people that wrote them typically being centered around people-first, not process-first) and with very imprecise human language by default are really, really slow to enact typically too. Besides the cost issues, a good engineer's work is far, far easier to sell anyway to where a mediocre, barely competent sales person should be able to get similar results with the usual sales guy pitching <random $1M suite of ERP software with $150M professional services over 6 years>.
So in short, good engineers with ineffective domain knowledge might make a great solution... that sadly doesn't solve what the person with the check wants up-front but you can put the most capable domain experts and managers to lead a team of bad engineers and the software will be both expensive to maintain (raising prices for the unfortunate customers) and perhaps just plain not work very often, causing more band-aid "solutions" that riddle cash-strapped bureaucracies and pass the dysfunction onto us as customers. I'm confident that tech is not the solution for most dysfunctional organizations and that IT projects just bring out the worst in them.
Unfortunetly I have :-( I used to work in house as a consultant for a big publisher and unfortuntly most of the devlopers wher in the lower two quartiles and required a rediculous amount of handholding.
BTW I was "banned" from writing any code that would go into production as a condition of my director being allowed to employ me.-
Look online for people with DCGS on their profiles, you'll be able to trace it all back to trying to reproduce Palantir down to the web GUI. Some decent journalist should be able to piece a lot together if they just trolled LinkedIn. A lot of it is unclassified but technically FOUO so not quite cleared for public consumption. The reason I figure it hasn't been researched thoroughly is because it's extremely boring DC area "tech" news that is more about topics that are of little interest to the tech community and is boring even by DC tech standards. Almost every company here is some Big Data bullshit company that's writing something about 8 - 14 years behind private industry timelines from an engineering standpoint and held back by politics, funding, and sheer disorganization endemic to enterprises but especially bad in the bloated Pentagon budget.