Forget for a moment that the reason for this website is a poorly designed and disastrous law that should have never been passed in the first place.
What matters now, in that there is some ability to actually do something about it, is keeping the monstrosity of this website in the public’s eye and holding the administration accountable for the long series of poor choices made, as well as the long series guaranteed to come.
First, because of the way the first contract was bid, the old disaster can’t be torn out from the roots and replaced entirely. That would open the old contractor to liabilities and the bidding process to congressional scrutiny. It should, but admitting failure is not an option here. This means a portion of the old poor decisions must remain, at least for a bit. This will drag down the replacement efforts, no matter how well they proceed.
Second, any well functioning IT system has an appropriately sized testing and rollout plan. Not here, schedule will not allow it. large swaths of code will be load tested for the first time in production, little to no security and penetration testing will occur, and significant risks will be accepted... often unknowingly. This means your personal information will be at risk as a user, insurance companies will be exposed to hackers and lawsuits, and all without accountability.
Third, when you pull an “all hands on deck” scramble on a complex problem, you are forced to borrow preassembled components from elsewhere and try to make them fit together. There are going to be major integration issues as each stakeholder shoves their products into the system, each with their own interfaces, data formats, and system requirements. The boutique interface translators will be a further drag on development and performance. They would also be a drag on testing, but the testing won’t actually occur.
Fourth, the political pressure is going to be a particular harm to the efforts. The administration has not been accommodating of criticism or eager to admit its faults, there is no indication this will be any different. Project manager, no matter how capable, will have a constant press by nameless bureaucrats to deliver successes they can present to the public quickly. They will shift priorities, undermine the project management at every turn and dissolve into the ether when called out for their meddling.
Long story short, this is going to be a disaster for a long time
If they could not do a tech surge in the last three years, what makes them think that they can do it now?
I hope the techies they hire report all the interfaces they find to the DNC and ACORN, and Soros organizations.
I’ll bet the cancer has metastasized to every socialist sympathizer that there is. It will include sharing your identity and your medical records, and will be excused after a sincere apology and the explanation that either it was a rogue worker or that they simply made a mistake.
This only telegraphs UTTER CATASTOPHIC FAILURE.
where will be the security checks of these “rescuers” be done?
What is really funny is that the stupid arrogant Phucker in the White House could have postponed this mess a year and blamed it on Republicans.
Software that’s been patched up to work, operates about as well as an Armani suite that was worn during a high speed motorcycle wreck (with lots of road rash) looks.
Sorry, Mr. Healthcare Official, the “best and brightest” are all gainfully employed at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zillow, Trulia, SalesForce.com, et al. You get the “worst and dimmest” because you are government and who in their right mind would work for you? You don’t offer anybody the chance to be a millionaire or maybe even a billionaire. Unless you’re a CEO crony corporatist crook, that is.
Yup. Easy to do this when one is spending Other People's Money.
Been there, done that (or rather, refused to get involved when I could.) A software disaster of this magnitude takes in my experience years to fix.
Another few billion squandered will do the trick. To screw up this much you really need a union.
Two approaches need to take place on this. They need to happen concurrently:
1.) Hearings on why the system originally failed. Subpoena EVERYTHING related to the effort.
2.) Hearings on whether this surge effort to “fix” the problems is adhering to government contracting law. Because the way I hear this the Obama Administration is definitely going down the road of “ask forgiveness not permission” and the “fixes” will happen in a highly illegal contracting environment.
WaPo: “Even now, administration officials are declining to disclose many details about the debugging effort. They will not say how many experts — whom they describe as “the best and the brightest” — are on the team, when the team began its work or how soon the site’s flaws might be corrected. Still, in talking about the repairs, administration officials for the first time conceded that the site’s problems extend beyond well-publicized front-end obstacles, such as with setting up a personal account.”
Technology is NEVER a substitute for good management (decision making)
And who will be determining who "the best and the brightest" are? How will the administration know?
Will there be a new turkey as project manager, willing to serve as sacrificial lamb?
The administration appears already to have made a political decision not to do a redesign and rewrite - suppose that doesn't work? What will they do then?
Has anyone considered how expensive and time-consuming it will be to maintain this turkey, what with all the hastily applied patches (that likely will cause other "glitches")? OMG!!! Heaven forbid that anyone should do any thinking instead of running around like chickens with their heads off.
It would take nothing less than scrapping the entire existing system and starting with an ARCHITECTURALLY SOUND DESIGN.
And at a minimum, it would take 2 to 5 years.
No matter how many warm bodies you throw at it.
Having done a lot of project management I can tell you with a lot of certainly, that throwing bodies to fix a dysfunctional implementation plan will fail badly. Throwing bodies that actually do work may help if the plan is solid and you simply need resources, but if the project execution plan is broken, as this one is, it will only get much worse. Me I’m hoping for an epic failure.