If it's not one pet peeve, it's another...

It's only Monday afternoon, but I've already been irked by both Wikileaks and the creators of the Army's information management system, Army Knowledge Online.  A recent article in the Army Times quotes Gary Winkler, the Army's top AKO official:

AKO’s program office, which polls 20,000 users each week, reported 78 percent of users said they couldn’t live without AKO e-mail. Winkler did not know the ratio of positive to negative responses from recent polls, but said “a lot of it is positive, with suggestions for improvement.”

I'd wager this is because the poll only collects data from those who log in to AKO in the first place. The more tech-savvy of us are so frustrated that we avoid AKO like the plague, relying on Gmail for all of our work needs.  Gmail is fast, it works with nearly every electronic device, we can check it without a chip-enabled military ID card, and most importantly, it's not limited to a paltry 100 megabytes of data, as AKO is.  

Not to mention, the myriad of defense computer systems--AKO, the Defense Travel System, the Defense Finance Service's "MyPay", and others--all require separate passwords, each with over a dozen characters.  The Army's system is so atrocious that I gave up on checking my officer's record brief prior to my upcoming promotion board.  I figured since the promotion rate is close to 98%, it wasn't worth the hassle anyway.  

Previous AKO tirades:

AKO Rehab
The Only IT System That Makes AKO Look Good
Now if Only There Were an Application to Replace AKO
AKO Links of the Morning
Bring Your Cloud to Work in Iraq (1 Raindrop)
Rational Rejection of Security Advice (Good scholarly work)