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First Day w/ the ACA... ClusterFuck

Liquid Karma said:
All is well!


What, you didn't hear? It's no different than an iPhone rollout.

Clusturd Fk. Healthy young people will just pay the fine. As for the rest...emergency room visits will not decline -- those who won't pay $40 - $50 won't pay anything. They don't give a fuck.
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The ironic part of all this is that the website development, information architecture, and management is actually not being carried out by federal employees or an agency- it's all private sector companies and their programmers. The government just issued the contract and statement of work specification. Of course, I have no doubt that the SOW had more than its share of dumb items, conflicting issues, and pitfalls but the ACA website is, as just about all government websites, actually developed and operated by a private company. Doesn't remedy the situation but it's more than a footnote. I wouldn't be surprised if the selection criteria for the companies involved was low-cost, technically acceptable. You get what you pay for
 
Which takes longer, the wait on the website, or an emergency room visit filled with uninsured people?
 
94Deac said:
The ironic part of all this is that the website development, information architecture, and management is actually not being carried out by federal employees or an agency- it's all private sector companies and their programmers. The government just issued the contract and statement of work specification. Of course, I have no doubt that the SOW had more than its share of dumb items, conflicting issues, and pitfalls but the ACA website is, as just about all government websites, actually developed and operated by a private company. Doesn't remedy the situation but it's more than a footnote. I wouldn't be surprised if the selection criteria for the companies involved was low-cost, technically acceptable. You get what you pay for
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Actually, not ironic at all. The government isn't going to be providing care. It's going to work through contracts and statement of work specification. The same behavior that they've failed to properly execute this time.



Can't run a website, thinks it can run 1/6th of the economy. Palm meets face.
 
So the problem is the government can't trust private sector companies to serve the American people?
 
Only this place could find a way to pin this clusterfuck on the private sector.
 
Haha. Skins thinks Obama is just sitting in the Oval Office frantically writing code.
 
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PhDeac said:
So the problem is the government can't trust private sector companies to serve the American people?
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You obviously know the answer. However, when people talk about graft, missing funds, failed or non-functioning deliverables in government projects, you're a bona fide fool if you think there isn't a private sector company involved. Haliburton says a rather robust hello, among others. The list of companies barred from competing for or working on government contracts is shockingly long.

SnD- no one is pinning this on the private sector; go back and re-read my post then find a brace for your knee.
 
As someone who does a fair amount of work on smaller fed contracts I can tell you that getting involved in a fed contract (even a smaller one) is a goddamn nightmare. The loop holes and red tape you have to jump through is 50 fold for non gov contracted work. I can't imagine what went on in this project. I have already heard there were several companies that were hired to do the same task, no oversight to make sure programs were compatible and no one controlling the overall project. In other words, a typical government boondoggle.

To a border point, is this President and his administration literally responsible for nothing? This is his signature legislation, this is the first and most critical roll out, they had years to get this right and it could not have gone worse. Yet, it is private contractors fault and no ones head has rolled.
 
Of course he's at fault to a point for trusting people to do this website who aren't getting it done. But he didn't build the website himself.
 
PhDeac said:
Of course he's at fault to a point for trusting people to do this website who aren't getting it done. But he didn't build the website himself.
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so you're saying he's a bad manager?
 
PhDeac said:
Of course he's at fault to a point for trusting people to do this website who aren't getting it done. But he didn't build the website himself.
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You got to love that level of accountability. "The Buck Stops Way Down There"
 
SkinsNDeacs said:
You got to love that level of accountability. "The Buck Stops Way Down There"
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Many people are accountable. Follow the money. I saw a strong 9 figure price tag for this. Somebody got paid well for poor results.

But I'm not sure how to make this clearer. Obama didn't build it. Somebody built it for him.
 
PhDeac said:
Many people are accountable. Follow the money. I saw a strong 9 figure price tag for this. Somebody got paid well for poor results.

But I'm not sure how to make this clearer. Obama didn't build it. Somebody built it for him.
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Obama_you_didnt_build_that_legos.jpg
 
I find the whole thing pretty interesting because of the situation I'm in as a sub on my current contract. Basically US Citizenship and Immigration hired IBM to build an online portal solution for all USCIS benefits. It's essentially the same thing as doing your taxes online - it used to be a bunch of forms, now you move it online and store information digitally, fill in the forms automatically and only ask what's required, etc. Basically lots of business logic, data storage, security, and sensitive data manipulation.

IBM Global Services did their thing, which is to ask for $400 million for a project that should cost $50 million, staff 400 people on site in DC, and spend 4 years arguing about requirements and having coders start over again and again. They were supposed to go live after year 1 with 10 forms, instead it took them 5 years to get out 1 form - and that launch was what you'd expect. A total disaster. Basically nothing worked despite serving only about 20 people per week.

We spent a year like that, the government finally freaked out and ordered IBM to fire 200 people - half our staff. They then demanded IBM switch to an agile development approach, and trained up some government folks in Agile methodologies and put them on site with each development team from IBM. Things are better now - but it took a while.

At the same time, realizing if things didn't get turned around soon everyone would be fired for gross incompetence, they started a 2nd program to start all over with a very similar approach to HealthCare.gov - small company, open source solutions, smaller price tag, flexible infrastructure, blah blah blah. It's also having huge problems.

Now, do you blast government for hiring IBM, one of the largest and most successful companies on the planet? Do you blast IBM for simply failing to meet its contracted obligations resulting in the firing of half their staff? Do you blast rules designed to ensure the government only spends money on projects that are well-vetted and approved by multiple committees and Congress - since that's what prevents the type of quick decision making and solution building the private sector enjoys? Do you blast the security requirements that doing top secret work in government data centers mandates, making hiring/firing/training new resources an incredibly slow process? Do you blame the other private and government-run functions that the system depends on, many of which are going through the same struggles?

It's all to blame, and it's very easy to add it all up and call it government incompetence. Anyone who works for a huge corporation, however, can likely relate to these kinds of difficulties. Now rotate in an entirely new BoT and executive staff every few years with typically opposing agendas.

So mainly I'm curious to see how this goes. I actually suspect that for government, this is what success looks like - ugly though it may be. The launch happened. Visibility was immediate. Alarms have been raised and things are getting fixed. It's not even November yet. I think it's likely more important to avoid what happened to us - 4 years of nothing - than it is to insist a site gets launched with excellent availability/performance at the outset. I think forcing its release was probably the right decision, even though everyone involved is going to take a beating. I think instead of firing those people you make them students of how the situation gets fixed and then put them in charge of applying those lessons learned to other programs such as ours.

What I know for sure is the answer is not as simple as government being terrible and private sector being awful.
 
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