Imagine you're launching a company and only have six months to deliver a product. You face a competitor that has been in your industry four years longer than you with twice your staff and twice the budget. If you don't make your deadline, you're out of business.

That, in a nutshell, was the situation facing the technology team for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. The Obama for America (OFA) organization had the advantage: it didn't have to wade through the primary season first, allowing OFA's technology team to focus on building an infrastructure. Based on an Ars analysis of the Romney campaign's financial reports, Romney's team had less to work with and passed the lion's share of technology-focused spending directly to advertising companies and telemarketers. This left Team Romney's tech squad with only a fraction of the budget for consulting, services, and infrastructure.

So, the campaign did what a lot of small businesses would do: they went to Best Buy. Or more accurately, they went to Best Buy's subsidiary, MindShift Technologies, a managed service provider that specializes in small and medium business consulting. And when they were in a pinch for tech help, they called Staples' subsidiary ThriveNetworks and a collection of small consulting firms with links to Romney and the Republican Party.

Apparently, that didn't work out so well.

Managing IT like a distressed asset

The Obama campaign's Team Tech planned its game assuming they would be the underdog. "We had no idea what the other side was doing," said Obama for America Senior Engineer Clint Ecker. "They had a bunch of money, and our presumption the whole time was these guys are smart business guys. We could only assume they were expending the same amount of resources to building up the same sort of infrastructure that we were."

Instead, the Romney campaign did what many corporations have done in tight times—it kept its IT budget in check and heavily outsourced technology relative to its budget, keeping only a few strategic efforts in-house. At the same time, top executives took care of their own base, bringing in their own companies and those of friends to provide key services. While it wasn't exactly a consulting feeding frenzy, the Romney campaign left most of its technological fate in the hands of outsiders—and even internal projects like Orca were dependent on quick fixes from outside talent.

Romney's total staffing was lean—over all, about 510 people collected paychecks from the Romney campaign (versus the over 1,000 people on OFA's payroll). The campaign's own IT operation was lean as well—only one percent of the campaign's overall expenses of $339 million went to supporting internal information technology. That included consulting and outsourcing services, Web hosting, broadband, hardware, and software. Ten times as much was spent by Team Romney's Digital and Voter Contact departments on external interactive advertising, telemarketing, and data management services—$36.4 million in total.

Romney's campaign followed a typical "go small" mid-sized business strategy for IT—outsourcing day-to-day IT to a managed services provider, bringing in spot consulting to help form strategy, and buying software and services from old friends. Companies with ties to Romney staffers got a lot of Romney's business. And when the campaign needed emergency tech support, they hit the "easy" button. For the meat of its internal tech team, the Romney campaign went cheap and young. In once case, they hired a freshly-minted RIT graduate as a contractor to be a system administrator, paying him just over $12,000 for six months of work.

A little help from (and for) my friends

At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company.

To round out the skills needed to support the campaign, Romney turned to a collection of small consulting shops—in some cases, one-person companies were formed to allow well-connected people with day jobs, like one former IT project manager of Bain Capital, to do technical consulting off the clock. The campaign also turned to a "virtual CIO" service to get strategic direction and called in some friends-of-friends, including a former Bain data center manager, as short-term advisors. He also paid his political action committee, Free and Strong America PAC, $34,183 for database development. He bought computer hardware from the PAC as well.

Romney's IT Consultants Name Notes Payments from Romney Campaign as of October 31 MindShift Technologies Acquired by Best Buy in 2011, the managed services company provided IT outsourcing, desktop support, and network services (including office PCs). CEO Paul Chisholm was a longtime Romney supporter, according to FEC contribution records. $811,213 Capitol Technology Solutions LLC Washington, DC based technology support and setup services company. Also did work for lobbying firm Crossroads Strategies. $5,958 FusionX LLC Cybersecurity consulting; Digital Director Zac Moffatt said the Romney campaign was attacked "every other day." $22,866 Jeffrey Flagg Was hired as Associate Systems Administrator for the Romney campaign, Rochester Institute of Technology Class of 2012 $12,692 JAC Advisory LLC A 1-year old Delaware LLC formed by James A Collins with no Web presence. Its registered office location is a townhouse in Wilmington, Delaware. $4,875 Minuteman Strategy The company of Romney Tech Director Kevin Rewkowski, who also worked tech for Romney's 2008 campaign. Performed Tech consulting and network support, and provided Internet services (including provisioning e-mail servers on Rackspace). $105,735 Louis Sanchez A wireless engineer from New Haven, Vermont $4,450 OnForce Inc On-site IT support $875 SJW Business Solutions LLC An LLC formed by former Bain Capital data center relocation manager and current Citizens Bank technology project manager Steve Whitmore. $7,973 The CA Group LLC A "virtual CIO services" company providing part-time IT leadership. $17,750 DriveSavers Apparently, some hard drives crashed on the campaign trail. $2,250 SignalShare A mobile Wi-Fi services, messaging, and analytics supplier that provides "live stadium Wi-Fi." $12,500 Johnny Galbraith A campaign copywriter and Web developer for the campaign. Was also paid $48,016 digital advertising consulting. $14,668 ThriveNetworks Staples' tech services subsidiary provides "experts on demand." $738 Bresco Solutions An Ohio networking provider. $405 Free and Strong America PAC Romney's PAC, did database development for the campaign. $34,183 TOTAL $1,059,131

Picking a few things up at the Apple Store

The Romney campaign didn't just rent its computers and network equipment. It also bought some things, including more than $67,000 worth of gear from Romney's Free and Strong America Political Action Committee. Some of the purchases were mislabeled in the report, with $2,652 spent at "210 Andover Street"—which is actually the address of the North Shore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts. Someone in the Romney campaign even paid for a piece of hardware through PayPal.

Computer and tech equipment purchases 210 ANDOVER ST (possibly the Peabody, Mass. Apple Store) $2652.05 AMAZON.COM $26,422.9 APPLE $33,606.12 B & H PHOTO-VIDEO $1,248.05 B&H PHOTO-VIDEO $507.2 BEST BUY $79.67 BEST LECTERNS $1,068 CDW $56,174.13 CDW DIRECT LLC $54,275.54 CELLHIRE LLC $5,753 FREE AND STRONG AMERICA PAC. INC. $67,046.5 FRY'S ELECTRONICS $613.79 MICRO CENTER $235.47 PAYPAL $79 PROVANTAGE CORPORATION $1,586.25 RITZ CAMERA $3,1.85 RYTHER CAMERA $6,999 SEARS.COM $484.49 SMART CITY NETWORKS $2,831 SOUND & IMAGES INC $250.36 Total $261,944.37

The cloud, Romney style

The Romney campaign was decidedly "cloud" in a 2008 sense of the word, relying on software-as-a-service and outsourced data centers. SaaS was used in nearly every department—SalesForce-based CRM, human resources management, and financial systems were all Web-based services. The biggest software expense—consuming 88 percent of the campaign's software budget—was a specialized campaign finance compliance SaaS system from Red Curve Solutions, a company started by Romney campaign Chief Financial Officer Bradley Crate. And the campaign spent $5,400 on TV Eyes, a Web service for searching and monitoring mentions on radio and television nationwide.

There was also a $160 fee paid to WordPress, and someone bought the campaign a Flickr Pro account.

As a sign of just how outsourced the Romney campaign's Internet presence was, Romney for President spent $21,000 directly on Web hosting. By comparison, the Obama campaign spent $1.4 million. The Internet services portion Minuteman Strategies' services (which accounted for about $16,000 of the payments made to Rewkowski's company by the campaign) amounted to just short of half of what the campaign's entire Internet hosting and services cost. The remainder went mostly to Brightcove, which sold Team Romney $19,922 worth of video cloud capacity.

Outsourcing, insourcing, and the robot uprising

While the Romney campaign was counting on outsourcing to ramp up quickly, the Obama campaign chose instead to heavily insource IT. Overall, the Obama campaign spent $9.3 million on technology, while building a mini-army of its own software and systems engineers who were part of the campaign's 1,000-person payroll. While it did outspend the Romney campaign on IT consulting (OFA tallied $3.5 million in consulting), that number included all of the Obama campaign's expenses on "digital" consulting from companies such as Blue State Digital as well. These efforts were tied into the Obama campaign's central technology infrastructure.

This paid off in a number of ways, including a reduction of the Obama campaign's dependence on telemarketing. The campaign brought most of its data management and analysis in-house, and turned its volunteers into a powerful data collection tool. While the Romney campaign spent $15.5 million on telemarketing services, the Obama campaign spent $11 million on outside telemarketing, relying more heavily on volunteers using the Call Tool developed by the campaign's Technology department.

Whether insourcing versus outsourcing mattered in the final vote count is debatable. The details of the "failure" of Orca (the strategic get-out-the-vote tool of the Romney campaign) still remain as murky as Orca's impact (or lack thereof) on the election. "Reading all this stuff about Orca has been scary," said Obama for America Chief Technology Officer Harper Reed, "because I don't like celebrating tech failures—I would never wish that on any enemy or opponent. It's a scary thing in the world, because technology is not our friend. It only fucks us over. We're just waiting for the robot uprising."