MCI: Down, but not out

Things have been looking up for bankrupt telecommunications giant MCI, formerly, and still legally, known as WorldCom. Although the company has been mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and a federal accounting investigation, it continues to win government contracts.

Contract income, in fact, reportedly stands at $800 million this year, up from $500 million in fiscal 2002. This month, MCI signed a $17 million contract with the House of Representatives, an extension of a contract it already held. MCI had been cruising along under the stewardship of ex-Compaq CEO Michael Capellas. Then, over the weekend, The New York Times reported a new federal investigation of claims that MCI bilked rival companies out of millions-or perhaps billions-of dollars in access charges, fees companies pay each other for use of their phone lines.

On Monday, MCI rival AT&T reported it will give investigators evidence that MCI diverted calls through Canada to avoid those fees, and that some of the calls came from the State Department and other federal agencies for whom MCI provides long distance services.

It's curtains for MCI's government business. Right? Don't hold your breath.

Lawmakers and activist groups have spent months cataloguing MCI/WorldCom's alleged abuses. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee, has made expelling MCI from the federal market something of a personal mission. She said Monday the recent revelations about MCI were "extremely disturbing," and she has called for the government to consider debarring MCI from contracting.

That hasn't happened. In June, the General Services Administration's inspector general deferred the debarment question to another agency official, who hasn't reached a decision. In November 2002, GSA renewed a massive telecommunications contract with MCI (then still doing business as WorldCom), likely the very contract under which those allegedly rerouted phone calls were placed.

Justifying that award, GSA said in a statement that the company's "performance has been consistent with the terms of the contract even after the announcements" of the accounting scandal and the bankruptcy.

And there is the rationale that explains why MCI's government work probably will not suffer because of the recent allegations. MCI works for nearly every agency in the government, including national security agencies. To suspend business with the company could utterly disrupt the government's daily activities.

There's no law against awarding contracts to bankrupt, unpopular or unscrupulous companies. In fact, the government does so all the time. Tyco International, which has disclosed that its executives received tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent bonuses, received more than $306 million in government contracts in fiscal 2002, according to official data.

Halliburton Corp., the favorite target of corporate-government conspiracy groups, given that Vice President Dick Cheney once served as its chief executive officer, was the 35th biggest contractor in fiscal 2002, scoring almost $700 million in federal revenue last fiscal year. In fact, last week's suspension of three Boeing aerospace units by the Air Force shows how rare the practice actually is-it was the first time in more than a decade that a major contractor had been suspended or debarred, according to the Project on Government Oversight, a corporate watchdog in Washington.

MCI executives likely aren't sweating now, at least as concerns their work for Uncle Sam. Had MCI chief Capellas thought the company's contracts were really in danger, he probably never would have gone to work there.

Bull Fighting

Wondering how robust your enterprise architecture really is, or how easily a global knowledge capitalization program can facilitate cultural evolution within various shared interest groups? Or maybe you're wondering what on earth-if anything-all that claptrap means?

Absolutely nothing, according to executives at Deloitte Consulting, who have unveiled a new program called "Bull Fighter" aimed at eliminating obfuscating technological jargon from written discourse.

With the click of a button, Bull Fighter will rate any document with its aptly named Bull Composite Index. Writings receive a score from zero to 10-a 10 being excellent, and a zero being a sign that you should probably stop trying to communicate using words altogether.

So, does Bull Fighter work? Government Executive editors put a random sampling of texts to the test.

One of the most-well known passages in the English language, the American Declaration of Independence, received a satisfactory 6.8. "The overall meaning remains discernible," Bull Fighter advised, "but it becomes possible to lose oneself in corollary thoughts, which may be worth exploration, but which can also detract from the core point of the written article."

What was more lucid than the epitome of Enlightenment thinking? President Bush's most recent State of the Union Address, which received a 7.6. Despite the inclusion of admittedly vague references to Iraq's alleged purchases of African uranium, Bull Fighter said the speech was "mostly clear, with some unnecessarily long words and sentences…. Most educated readers will navigate the text with no difficulty."

At the low end of the bull scale was some "prose" well known within government circles. Part 19 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the section that determines small business' eligibility for special programs, received an embarrassing 4.3. Perhaps that's not surprising to anyone who's read the FAR, Bull Fighter admonished, saying "You like to hear yourself write…. You shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose…. Seek help."

Suffering the same sins of style, the Homeland Security Department's online explanation of its color-coded advisory system received the same score. The only government text in the survey that scored lower was the Office of Management and Budget's definition of the federal enterprise architecture, a blueprint that shows how technology systems supposedly work together. OMB scored a 2.7 for its use of hackneyed buzz words such as "citizen-centered," "results-oriented" and "market-based organization."

Our editors are suspicious, however, of whether Bull Fighter is as savvy as its designers claim. That's because the top score in the survey went to Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr., a congressional intern who was recently dismissed from his summer job after penning an e-mail message to a female intern informing her "you suck." The object of Tripplehorn's disgust, he says, was infatuated with him and needed to be brought down a peg, prompting the young man to fire off the following passages, which earned him a score of 9: "This afternoon, I was planning on ruining your career by making phone calls to all of my parents' friends and have you blackballed from the workplace as well as every prestigous (sic) law school in the country…. You are an absolute hipocrit (sic) in everything that you do…. I can assure you if you were to ever meet yourself you would hate your twin." The e-mail has been widely circulated on the Internet in the past several weeks.

It's rather suspicious that Tripplehorn's fiery epistle should be a better example of good writing than one of the most cherished documents in the canon of American literature. More troubling is that Bull Fighter apparently doesn't deduct points for errors in spelling and grammar. Nevertheless, by Deloitte's standards, Tripplehorn should be ready for a job as a presidential speechwriter.

The company may want to snag him first, however. Deloitte's parent company, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, came in last place in our survey. Its description of its technology, media and telecommunications practice scored an abysmal 2.6.