Posted on 10/25/2013 3:17:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
This week, as programmers in Washington scrambled to fix the glitch-ridden healthcare.gov, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act architecture, their counterparts in Silicon Valley viewed the situation with a mixture of rolled eyes and sympathy.
Many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have experienced a flawed launch of a big product, accompanied by unexpected delays and over-budget implementation. It's the way things go here, and failure is often embraced as a learning experience. Still, around the coffee shops of San Francisco and the tech campuses of the South Bay this week, the topic of the government's health-care push often elicited cynical jokes — one tech worker quipped that a Stanford computer-science class could have built healthcare.gov for a thousandth of the reported $400 million–plus budget — and confusion. How could a project involving a budget of that size and five years of lead time fail so badly? What was so hard about building, as some have called healthcare.gov, a Kayak for health insurance?
Matt Mullenweg, the co-developer of WordPress (the open-source platform that five states are using to run their own health-insurance exchanges), was among the confused. Healthcare.gov, the largest chunk of which was overseen by Canadian IT firm CGI Federal, "gets more money than all the revenue of most Silicon Valley start-ups combined," he said. He added that although "start-ups have failed launches all the time" — citing Twitter as an example of a site that was "unreliable for years" — the scale of the health-care site, and its importance to the Obama administration's policy aims, should have made transparency a priority. "If the government is going to spend that much money on something, it should be open source," Mullenweg told me in a phone call. "How cool would it have been if the site launched, didn't work, and some passionate coders came in and said, 'Oh, here's a problem, and here, and here?' But the people who want to help aren't able to."
Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup and a member of Silicon Valley's cognoscenti, echoed Mullenweg's concerns. Speaking after an event in San Francisco's Soma district that was filled with tech types, Ries told me that the botched healthcare.gov rollout was emblematic of what he called "state-of-the-art incompetence." He explained that the old-school approach to the site's development, which relies on a management system known as the "waterfall model," and whose back-end database appears to run on Oracle software, had all but ensured it would run over-budget, late, and riddled with technical problems:
"You could take any engineer on the street here and ask them, 'I have a friend who works for a private company — don't mention the government — who's thinking about a five-year, $100 million Oracle installation, and they've hired an outsourced contractor to build it for them. It's going to be proprietary, hosted in their own data center, Oracle-based, with waterfall management. What are the odds that it's working on Day One?' And everyone here will tell you: zero percent."
But while Ries blames the specific structure of healthcare.gov for its failures, other programmers, perhaps sympathetic to Silicon Valley's emerging suspicion of government, see it as symptomatic of the government's ham-fisted approach to technology. The site is "only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government," wrote Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, two programmers with political pasts (Johnson was Howard Dean's lead programmer in 2004; Reed was the brain behind Obama's 2012 digital campaign) in a Times op-ed. The pair went on:
This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch ... We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.
The White House has promised that a "tech surge" of the "best and the brightest," including from Silicon Valley, has been brought in to repair the health-care site. But nobody knows, or is telling anyone, who those people actually are. Contractors grilled at a congressional hearing this week wouldn't name names, and several tech executives questioned yesterday said they had no inside information on the makeup of the government's emergency coder team. Verizon has reportedly been tapped to help with the revamp, but the extent of its involvement isn't known. Former budget official Jeffrey Zients is overseeing the rescue, but since he's not a known coder, his role is limited to managing the project.
Most plugged-in Valley insiders suspect, and hope, that Todd Park is involved. Park, the nation's chief technology officer since last year, is a founder of two health-care-focused start-ups — Athenahealth and Castlight Health — and is seen by many here as the only person in earshot of the White House who truly knows his stuff.
"If Todd Park is in charge of this, they're going to be fine," Ries said. "That guy knows what he's doing; he's an entrepreneur by background. And nobody I know has been able to reach him since October 1, so we all assume he's in there fixing things."
Whether the "tech surge" consists of a few more back-end developers or a full-scale revamp of healthcare.gov, no one doubts that the site will be fixed eventually, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will continue apace. (In a conference call this morning, Zients predicted that the site would "work smoothly" by the end of November.) But the episode has confirmed the suspicions of many in Silicon Valley that the government's infrastructure, even on key projects, relies too heavily on outdated legacy systems and could be run more efficiently by those inside their own camp.
"I wish there was a better way to help," Mullenweg said of the health-care site's emergency overhaul. "It's just code."
Obama planned for failure.
He wants America to fail
How is it there’s this Tech genius in the administration who can be trusted to fix this (Todd Park) if it went up on the rocks in clear weather regardless of his presence? If he’s been there a year, he’d have lost his vocal cords by now advising against almost every decision and cost cutting measure made since then and look at the “finished” product. Did they keep him off it on purpose or was he on it for the past year - brought in when they saw the first iceberg. If he was on the project and ignored, have they decided to listen to him a little? If he’s that good, he knows it can’t be resolved by end of November. How could anyone as gifted as he is said to be allow himself to be associated with this project?
Incompetence squared to the nth degree. Anyone competent in IT recognizes it.
I have this vision of some high school geeks sitting around the lunchroom, laughing their asses off as they identify the problem and fix it during lunch break ... written out on a napkin
“Dr. Sheldon Cooper? Please pick up the White Courtesy Phone in the Lobby!”
Todd Park is back he's gonna save the situation
(Hey-la-day-la Todd Park is back).
Exactly! This was Obama’s FAILURE ON PURPOSE. Just another tool to bring down our economy.
If anyone ever does actually get fired or publicly flogged for this gigantic failure (still in the process of failing),
it will probably be a white male. Obama does not usually hesitate to snatch away someone’s livelihood if they are of a certain race and gender. Of course there are exceptions. Think back to the man J. Christian Adams, a government lawyer who exposed the racial bias that protected the Black Panthers from being prosecuted for voter intimidation.
Any IT professional worth their salt wouldn’t touch this crap with a 50 foot keyboard.
The ONLY people that are going to “fix the glitches” are going to be amateurs.
Sit back, relax, and watch the movie. We all know the ending.
If it’s likely that the fix will take a long time, and cost a lot of money; a competition might be the best approach.
One team could concentrate on attempting to repair the existing system.
The other team would start with a clean slate, and use whatever model they think best. Most of the Silicon Valley geniuses would likely opt for this team.
Winner takes all.
The rescuer is one of the parties who created the disaster. Say what?!? This is a PR event only: get the heat off for 30 days. If they could have fixed it, it would not have been so horribly broken. Sad that 0bama could not have come up with a more credible fix plan. But he has punted it for 30 more days, and those who will believe, will believe, and hey it takes the heat off. Well no it should not be allowed to take the heat off for 30 days! We are not stupid, we know it is a PR announcement not a valid tech assessment. The Emperor had no clothes — still, again.
"I wish there was a better way to help," Mullenweg said of the health-care site's emergency overhaul. "It's just code."
I would argue that anyone who has ever worked for/in/contracted to the Federal Government knows:
1. The talk about the the "Web Page Software" is a diversion from the real problem areas.
2. The core operational Obama/Hillarycare code will not be fully annotated, not fully configuration managed, to include the original code and all of the numerous changes/revisions that occurred over time and/or were performed by different contractors or contractor subgroups.
3. The Obama/Hillarycare code must interface with existing and/or in-development code for other Agencies like the IRS, Social Security Office, and the Lord only knows how many other agencies. Keep in mind the historical problems and money spent over many years in upgrades/revisions to the hardware/software in all of those other agencies due to "glitches" as the government likes to call them. All of those upgrades/revisions undoubtedly suffer from the code documentation/configuration management problems described in #2 above.
4. The government employees and/or the contractors running the database/IT functions of all those other agencies do not generally take kindly to "outsiders" (read: Obama/Hillarycare's sweetheart deal contractor/subcontractors) having access to "their" systems and data, and will find ways for the outsiders to fail.
5. The government employees and/or the contractors running the database/IT functions of those other agencies all gather intelligence on other Agencies/contractors in the never ending pitched battles for the taxpayers' dollar.
6. Because the Obama/Hillarycare monster could eventually consume other agencies'/contractors' empires, behind the scene politicking (read: pleadings to congressmen with vested interests) and monetary incentives (read: bribes) will be utilized to "protect" each agency's home turf and their piece of the taxpayer pie.
7. So I would argue that it's NOT a foregone conclusion that "the site will be fixed eventually, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will continue apace", or that the solution is as simple as the statement that "it's just code".
I have only pointed out the tip of the iceburg when it comes to the "real" reasons for why the Obama/Hillarycare Monster is failing.
Brooks Law is the operational definition.
The Project Death March is the realization.
Go Obama, go!
It's possible that we may be able to defeat an entire generation of Democrat candidates just by bringing up Obamacare.
ping
It took 87 days to cap the BP///Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Probably take the same time to fix the 0-Care website. They will lie and never admit it but they are probably going to start from scratch on a new website designed by calm competent people while they patch the present one enough to look and be more functional. Then one day the new website will be slotted into place (you will never hear about it) and the present one chucked in the trash.
good post!!! Michelle Malkin has drawn a bead on another 0-Care website disaster>>>
Don’t forget Obamacare’s electronic medical records wreck
By Michelle Malkin • October 23, 2013 09:29 AM
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/10/23/dont-forget-obamacares-electronic-medical-records-wreck/
I could never have imagined the things I encountered in my years working in the Federal Government -- that's one of the major reasons I'm an advocate of rolling the Federal Monstrosity back to ONLY what can be justified by the Constitution - and then WATCHING IT CLOSELY!
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