Website contractors blame Obama administration

[Live and Learn]

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The principal contractors responsible for the federal government's trouble-plagued health insurance website say the Obama administration shares responsibility for the snags that have crippled the system.

Executives of CGI Federal, which built the federal HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states, and QSSI, which designed the part that verifies applicants' income and other personal details, are testifying Thursday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

<snip>

The focus on the contractors is a first step for GOP investigators. After the failure of their drive to defund "Obamacare" by shutting down the government, they've been suddenly handed a new line of attack by the administration itself. Administration officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, are to testify next week.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/website-contractors-blame-obama-administration-070655437--politics.html

---

Of course they don't want to place blame on the private contractors they insist the government hire. It is nothing new, underbidding and making unrealistic promises is the way to win contracts. Once you are locked in and they can't afford to start over, claim they didn't explain the scope or whatever and charge more to fix it.

Privatization is the culprit here and nobody but nobody is reporting it!

[MrModerate]

1. As best I can tell . . .

This is an insanely complex system, supposed to be implemented by 50 (50!) separate contractors. Having been through a few enterprise-wide software implementations at my company (which only has 50,000 people) these things are hard. Very, very hard.

And every additional contractor you have in the mix multiplies the difficulty.

The large question is, why did HHS think it could succeed in such a time frame?

[Fumesucker]

2. What the fuck did anyone expect from a two thousand plus page bill full of lawyer speak?

Of course the implementation was going to be a damn nightmare, I honestly don't see how it could have possibly been any other way.

The Devil, as always, is hiding in the details.

Medicare for all would have been orders of magnitude less complex.

The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

[Live and Learn]

4. Governmental programs are always a nightmare.

Even if you understood the original requirements which few private companies do, they are apt to change often and quickly by new legislation.

[merrily]

60. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p27.html

They do Medicare, too.

[Hoyt]

7. Fortunately, most of those pages had nothing to do with registering for coverage.

[MrModerate]

15. To be fair, implementing a sane single-payer system . . .

Would have been as complex, if not more so.

[Fumesucker]

20. Figuring out if someone is a human being or not is complex?

That would be a sane single payer.

At least it would be for my definition of sane, your mileage may differ.

[MrModerate]

23. I believe it was you who said "the devil's in the details"

You were right.

[Fumesucker]

26. The Canada Health Act established universal access to health care in Canada, it is 14 pages long..

It's also in both English and French so in reality the Act is only 7 pages.

Here is a link to the entire legislation (PDF):

http://laws.justice.gc.ca/PDF/Statute/C/C-6.pdf

And the HTML version (English only):

http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-6/FullText.html

The more details, the more Devil..

[cheapdate]

39. The US health law uses 7 pages

just to talk about abortion restrictions and non US citizens.

[MrModerate]

86. 330 Million people to sign up. Just sayin'. n/t

[merrily]

62. No evidence for that. Please see Reply 60

When OASDI was implemented, everything had to be done by hand, too. Not sure about Medicare.

Every person who hits a certain age gets his or her lifetime work record in the mail. Ditto the checks and the Medicare card.

Disability can be a mess at first, though, because they have to verify you are disabled, which can take a while and has some degree of subjectivity to it.

[MrModerate]

87. You can't realistically compare a paper-based system . . .

To an online one. Each stage of a paper-based system is personally handled by the most sophisticated computing system on the planet -- a human being. And you can't access that system from your kitchen table. Apples and oranges.

[cheapdate]

35. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)

Last edited Thu Oct 24, 2013, 02:22 PM - Edit history (1)

was passed by Congress and signed by the President on March 23, 2010. The act is nine hundred and six (906) pages long. The act was codified as Public Law 111-148 -- which is also 906 pages.

The PPACA includes ten Titles that address separate aspects of national health care. Most of the act deals with mundane matters related to Medicare and Medicaid payment reforms, rural health clinics, grants to nursing colleges, health matters on Indian reservations, etc. etc.

But most of what the general population is interested in is found in TITLE I--QUALITY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS. This section is one hundred and fifty-three pages and includes all of the provisions related to health insurance market reforms, the "individual mandate", the insurance exchanges, etc.

[merrily]

63. Good info. Thanks.

[sendero]

36. That's been my contention..

... all along. It is just too damned complicated.

But this is what they wanted and now they have to make it work. As a software jock myself, I'd say that they have got their work cut out for them, and while a couple weeks ago I was not worried that it could be fixed up good enough in a month or two, now I'm not so sure.

The fundamental design of the site, to attempt to verify every detail as they go along, is fatally flawed. Nobody does it this way. People coming to the site want one simple question answered, what is my premium (if eligible of course). This could be determined by letting the applicant enter their income, and other details and taking their word for it. If they are wrong, their answer will be wrong. A large number of folks upon seeing their premium will have had their question answered and they will be done. Overall site load reduced substantially, and the difficult integrations with other databases cut in half or less.

I hope Obama truly has his A-team on this because it is definitely not a slam dunk.

And I have worked with CGI-Federal before and that doesn't give me much comfort either.

[taotzu]

53. CGI-FEDERAL

sender, completely agree with you have dealt with this company in the past and they very few sharp people working for them. People have to remember also that the right wing congress has delayed monies over the past five years with their votes to defund the law and with the sequestration. But more to your point we should have used IT companies here in the U.S. to implement the system.

[Bo]

102. Why didnt they just use BIG BLUE...IBM?

CGI looks like some clip joint out of Canada. lol.

[Puzzledtraveller]

48. Hear, hear Fumesucker!

[ladjf]

57. Very good points. nt

[Live and Learn]

3. Most government systems are complex

but contractors seldom know why which may be a reason they underbid (though I think most are simply onto the system).

The real question is why the government wouldn't simply use its own people (and hire more if necessary) so that they could not only build a system they better understood but maintain the system later. The push towards privatizations is the answer to that question but nobody ever asks the question.

In fact, instead of asking the question. the current news media blames the government for the failure of the private company that performed the services and acts like another private company will be the solution to the government's failure. It is lunacy in play.

[MrModerate]

18. I have to disagree . . .

Managing huge information systems integration is not what government does for a living. Running those systems, sure, but creating new ones and getting them to work together, not so much.

The only sensible way to do this was to bring in firms who do integrate systems for a living — and then manage the bejeezus out of them.

It's impractical to think the government would hire a thousand 300K-a-year system analysts and programmers, and then fire them a few months later. You have to do this with contractors. And you don't want to do it with an army of independents, because they won't know how to work with each other. Hence you hire fully capable private firms to do the job.

And then manage the bejeezus out of them (actually, you hire another firm to do the bejeezusing, because the government isn't staffed to do that, either).

On the whole, contracting this sort of work out is the smart and honorable way to go.

It doesn't seem to have worked in this case, however. It's the bejeezus factor.

[Live and Learn]

21. I disagree with your summation.

The government already has plenty of IT workers that not only understand systems but also the government programs that it administrates. Yet, nearly every new implementation that comes up it contracted out.

When the government even looks at a new software to implement be it a database, business intelligence, research or data mining the companies are always keen to point out that the government workers can't handle the software and we need their expertise. Once they leave (if they leave and haven't managed a lifelong contract) guess who not only maintains it but fixes the mess they left.

Please tell me who integrates more systems and more complex (ever changing) systems than the government?

[MrModerate]

88. "IT workers" are not system designers.

My company has lots of "IT workers." We don't create new enterprise-wide systems by ourselves, we go to companies who specialize in creating such systems. Every large enterprise does so, because it's impracticable to have such people on your staff unless that's what you do for a living.

[fasttense]

31. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper would disagree with you vehemently

"Grace Hopper (I met her once) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (inspired by an actual moth removed from the computer)."

Just one example of many.

Tell me again how government workers can't create NEW computer systems?????

[MrModerate]

89. Two things:

1) Hopper was a pioneer, at a point in the development of information technology where a single individual or team could (and did) have major influence on what was basically an infant science. It ain't that way anymore.

2) You do realize a project like this takes literally thousands of specialists? It would be the height of imprudence to have these people on the payroll when you weren't rolling out a major new system — which is almost all the time. Would you keep a painting crew living in your back yard, and on your payroll, for the one time every 5 years when you paint your house?

[JusticeForAll]

94. agreed

Your points are solid.

Design is worlds apart from maintenance.

[fasttense]

97. Well actually we are NOT talking about mundane things like painting a house.

Computer technology is in everything everywhere today. It's in supply systems, it's in driving planes and ships, its in dropping bombs and shooting torpedoes, it's in organizing huge data bases of citizen's information. It's in managing libraries and research.

So, yes I would keep a group of top experts to coordinate, develop and manage this technology on hand at all times. Maybe thousands, yes. Just think of all the people that would have new good paying jobs.

But what is happening with contracting out is that the government is NOT merely contracting out for specialist. They are contracting out entire projects for life. The projects never get handed off to government worker to maintain and update. The corporate control of the projects never lets go. They maintain them and reap profits and excess CEO pay for the life of the project not the life of merely the start up.

Look at the NSA spying. It's been up and running for years but corporate contractors still do all the work. If government workers had developed it and were running it instead of paid shills for corporations, maybe the NSA would not have turned into an industrial espionage ring and political blackmail syndicate.

[another_liberal]

98. I saw a live interview with her on Letterman some years ago.

She brought a bunch of pieces of wire, each about six or seven inches long. When Dave asked her what they were, she replied: "They're nanoseconds."

Each piece of wire was the length of copper wiring an electron can travel in a nanosecond (one one-millionth of a second). I thought that was a really excellent teaching tool.

[merrily]

64. Disagree.

[Hoyt]

5. The decision to force people to register before reviewing plans, etc., was a blunder.

Will be interesting to hear the spin on that.

But, Internet issues or not, I am solidly behind Obama care. They should increase awareness of sign ups by phone, and greatly expand locations and personell for face-to-face sign ups.

[Live and Learn]

8. Agreed, that was a big blunder.

Guessing it is because the prices differ so much depending upon the info and subsidies and not getting that info doesn't give accurate information. Still, they could have allowed unofficial peaks of different prices at different incomes that would have given viewers a taste of the benefits without signing in.

[bemildred]

99. Yes, that is insurance marketing thinking there.

I cannot remember the number of web sites I have abandoned after they first-thing made demands for identifying information. They are trying to weed people out who are "just looking".

[Hoyt]

100. Good point. That stuff ticks me off too. And the "insurance sales" mindset really sucks.

[bemildred]

101. Once they start that shit, I'm gone.

I'm old school, I remember when customer service was not just computerized bullshit intended to get more money from you in this nation.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

6. Nail hit squarely on head!

"Of course they don't want to place blame on the private contractors they insist the government hire. It is nothing new, underbidding and making unrealistic promises is the way to win contracts. Once you are locked in and they can't afford to start over, claim they didn't explain the scope or whatever and charge more to fix it.

Privatization is the culprit here and nobody but nobody is reporting it!"

I even know someone doing this type of thing right now. He accidentally underbid and is now stressed out completely.

[Live and Learn]

10. You can tell him not to bother stressing just follow previous leads

and come up with ways the requirements have changed or the scope has increased. Government agencies almost always pay up not matter how upset they may (pretend or actually) be.

That seriously is the norm in government contracting. If he is really wise, he will find a way to ensure that his company is needed for as long as the program is used. Unless, it is really a poor job, in which case, he should leave it to the government workers to fix or a new contractor to start from scratch.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

91. his is not a govt contract, just a private company that is demanding more and more.

He should have got everything in writing AND not bid so low.

[seveneyes]

9. You have to buy and build the system

Before you can see what it does.

[Live and Learn]

12. Or you could do it yourself.

All this sniveling about government workers not being able to do anything right is just bs. Has NASA never done anything right? Of course government workers can and do accomplish a lot. You might have to pay them a decent wage or at least give them some decent benefits but doing will ensure that you have a system built by those that understand the business rules and the complexity involved and can maintain the system in the future.

[warrant46]

14. You might have to pay them a decent wage or at least give them some decent benefits

And that is what the Koch Brothers do NOT WANT TO DO

Just look at Wisconsin and the elected thug Scott Walker to see the results of the Koch Rand Philosophy

[Live and Learn]

16. +1 Exactly. Sad part is that they are succeeding in

turning our public sector in to exactly what they have always proclaimed it to be by non-funding it (just as they are doing to our students and manufacturing base).

[warrant46]

17. Especially education Scotty boy outlawed public employee unions

Except for the State Police thugs who protect his Sorry Ass

And slashed Billions from the Budget to run the Public Schools

Apparently its good enough to get your edumakation from Fixed News (Murdoch's Reality)

[cui bono]

11. Am I crazy to think that "testifying" is a bit overkill at this point?

How about they just see what the issue is and work to fix it?

What the fuck is Sebelius going to have to say about website code?

[Live and Learn]

13. Betting testifying and blaming the government is easier

than actually fixing the code.

One thing you learn in IT is doing it right the first time is a whole lot more efficient than fixing it later.

[Igel]

19. Exactly.

How conservative, blaming the bosses for what goes wrong. Bosses simply are above making mistakes.

It's always and only the fault of the workers. That's the True Progressive (tm) view.


One thing I learned while watching the building my office was undergoing a massive seismic and code-compliance retrofitting--if you tell the contractor what you want well in advance, things can still go wrong and be more expensive than thought. But if you tell the contractor one thing before the bid, another thing after the bid, make changes as the construction is ongoing and then make more changes to the requirements, many things will go wrong and the price can easily increase by 5-fold or more.

And, of course, the company management will always blame the contractor when talking to the company board. At some point you have to say, "The people in charge are being paid to be in charge. If they can't manage their employees, if they can't take responsibility, if they can't monitor progress and avoid massive snafus, perhaps we have the wrong people in charge."

Unless we want to revise Truman to have said, "The buck stops as far from me as I can convince the voters."

[Fumesucker]

24. Communication is probably the biggest single problem in anything that involves more than one human

If I've learned anything from being online since the days of 300 baud acoustic modems and Atari computers it's that saying things clearly, succinctly and unambiguously is remarkably difficult.

[Live and Learn]

28. Please, the contractors know what is expected

and they know that governmental business rules change frequently. When the rules change it is expected the government will up the money and it is expected that the rules will change. But they use that expectation to charge for their own failures.

Why do you think nearly every governmental project using private contractors costs more than bid?

I'll grant you that it doesn't seem the government has managers experienced in hiring contractors and weeding out those that may fleece you much like many homeowners don't. Or maybe those at the you are getting campaign contributions or whatnot.

What I can tell you is that at present, government IT workers are quite capable of doing a job they are rarely given the opportunity to perform and are usually the ones behind the scenes cleaning up after the contractors leave.

One thing I have noticed lacking in both government and private contractors is a lack of project management skills. The entire project really does lie in the organization and team work a good PM brings to the table.

[Live and Learn]

34. And, that IMHO is also one of the reasons

so many governmental managers go along with private contracts. They don't want to accept blame when things go wrong as they so often do in IT projects. Because the projects are so complex, it is much easier to pay someone else to do it.

Unfortunately for them, it doesn't work (at least in this day and age), people will still blame the governmental agency regardless of who they paid for the failure.

They forget that public now expects them to be experts at procuring, securing, navigating and managing equally complex contractual agreements with which they have little expertise. Not to mention sometimes managing the systems they didn't design after the contractors leave.

[Fumesucker]

22. Oddly enough that's also true in some other fields of endeavor besides IT

[davidpdx]

29. Not if you are a Republican

Hell I expect them to threaten impeachment over this.

[merrily]

67. Not with the approval ratings they have right now.

[lostincalifornia]

47. It is all political theater, it has nothing to do with trying to make things better. In fact, it

is another attempt by the right wing to destroy the most vulnerable in this country.

and the media is front and center the accessory to as much misinformation as they can convey.

Just turn on any financial show, and 90% of the information spewed out, whether it is about a company or the economy in general is wrong, and yet despite that shoddy performance, they continue to do their pseudo jobs spreading more misinformation day in and day out.

Kathleen Sebelius is not going to resign, nor should she. She is going to be used as part of this republican kangaroo court, but she will hold up just fine, and I have no doubt, just like the ignoramuses that tried to make Benghazi a political issue, will fail on this.

[Joey Liberal]

25. People at CGI say their own IT sucks

For a contractor to blame the customer is a joke. Most of CGI's own internal web sites never work according to its employees. And they are now only giving their employees the minimum essential health coverage. Not exactly a good way to motivate your developers to do a good job on a healthcare web site.

[another_liberal]

27. Oh yeah! Well, how about you jokers give us our goddamned money back?

"We did a shitty job building your web site, and it's all your fault!"

[Joey Liberal]

30. And I hear the CGI supports the GOP

Curious that republicans are not saying anything about the piss poor job that CGI did on this web site. Could it be their silence is due to CGI's campaign donations to republicans?

[another_liberal]

33. I heard a report on NPR yesterday . . .

It seems a subsidiary of CGI totally screwed up a health care sign-up web site for Great Britain several years ago, to the cost of a cool billion pounds. The Brits have no Republicans or Tea Party types trying to destroy their government, so they were able to hire a few hundred IT people to redo the work as government employees. The system was soon fixed and has been running fine (with constant attention from those new government IT workers).

[Joey Liberal]

80. I need to check out NPR!

[cui bono]

90. We should have hired their clean up crew.

Did they not check resumes? Perhaps all they did was a credit check.

[groundloop]

32. I just had a thought - Who from these contractors would be testifying ---- CEO's etc.

It's the 1 percenters from these contractors who are the ones sitting there telling the GOPers in the House that it's the administration's fault.

Plus, obviously, it's all just another repub attempt to embarrass the administration instead of providing any useful help.

[another_liberal]

38. Right . . .

. . . on both points.

[Live and Learn]

44. +1 You can be sure it won't be

those that foresaw the problems with their own management. It never is. And in any IT project it is nearly always the project manager or above at fault but it is rarely blamed on them. In any government enterprise it should actually be easy to tell from emails and reports but it is extremely rare for any agency to request them from subordinates.

[marble falls]

37. Great points on low bid contracts!

[SCVDem]

40. How's that F 22 project working?

Now there's a Republican led clusterfuck.

[lostincalifornia]

41. What absolutely bullshit. You are given a project, you make an estimate, and you blame the person

who gave you the project

Maybe I can try that the next time my manager gives me a project and I scope it out, write appropriate technical documents and implement it, and if it doesn't work out blame my manager.

I am so convinced that the loudest big mouth critics in this are complete imbeciles. The same imbeciles who told us that there were wmds in Iraq, and deregulation was a good thing.

[ReRe]

42. I totally agree about the Privatization...

K&R

... and I bet you the fix was in from the very beginning, written right into the law. What I want to know is who did all the other .gov websites and do they all function normally? How could the private contractor not know the scope of the job? Did someone in the administration just assume that all the states would administer their own sites? So many questions. If the government enters into a contract and forks over the money for the project, isn't the contractor liable if they don't deliver? Were they paid in full for this job at the beginning? If so, then I say they are left holding the bag.

Privatization is the problem. And slowly but surely, private contractors are dismantling this country. The Education system (don't get me started); our election system with Diebold vote-stealing machines; pharmaceutical companies who won't develop SOMETHING to deal with this effing super bug pan-epidemic that killed 23,000 Americans last year and thousands more world-wide, and on the path to kill more and more and more each year as there is no cure for it, just because antibiotics are not profitable anymore; poisoning our environment with these effing pipelines; and on, and on, and on. AND WE ARE PAYING FOR ALL OF IT!!!

[Live and Learn]

45. +1 The public loves hearing privatization

but rarely do they realize that it means their tax dollars are going to pay for private companies. And, that they are getting less for more with less accountability.

[groundloop]

46. AND employees are getting less

Time after time after time a government function is "privatized" and many of the same people who did that job for the govt. end up doing it for the contractor, only they get paid less, and don't have health insurance or paid time off. It's the owners and CEO's of these contractors who are reaping the benefits, not the employees and not the taxpayers.

[Live and Learn]

50. Very true. nt

[ReRe]

51. Damn right...

... I'd say 46% of that 47% that voted for Romney has absolutely no idea what "privitization" means, or the term "private contractor"." There are even a certain percentage of those 47% that wear their ignorance like a badge of honor. They are the right wing's "base." So sad, especially for their children.

[bemildred]

43. When they are selling their services they sing a different tune.

And they do charge an arm and a leg, plus their guaranteed profit.

[Live and Learn]

49. Exactly, it is eerily similar to the experience homeowners

have with contract companies.

The sad part is that those in management typically leave out the opinions of those that actually will be responsible for the work later. I can tell you from experience that government it workers often are against the contract because we see through the bs and vocalize such but are ignored.

I have actually witnessed an IT contractor make up demos because they couldn't get them to work (in essence, they display a series of Photoshopped images instead of live shots) and even though workers and upper management knew they were faked, they allowed it. Once management approves a contract , they don't want to be embarrassed by having it fail so they will go to extreme lengths to allow it to succeed including securing more funds and contractors are well aware of this phenomenon.

I am not claiming that government IT workers never make mistakes or that contractors always leave a mess but my experience is that it is much easier to fix and maintain governmental IT run projects than contractor run projects.

[bemildred]

52. I spent 17 years doing software in defense, corruption was everywhere, it's all about the money.

[Live and Learn]

54. Can't disagree with that.

I often wonder who is getting some kind of payment in our department although us workers won't even take a free lunch(per the no gifts rule, a good one I think) from contractors. They are usually shocked when we insist in paying our own way which makes me think those above don't follow the same rules.

[bemildred]

68. I was a contactor. Rules are much different.

I mean you have to know the FARS stuff, and whatever the current dogma is about how things can be done cheap, fast, and right, buy that's all talk; and as you note, that's mainly about what Federal employees can do, and in practice, corruption in business is taken for granted, selling crap at exorbitant prices in their business plan, and if you are a manager your loyalty will be well compensated.

I can tell stories, I'll bet you can too.

They tried to make me a manager several times, one time I took it for 3 years, but usually that was when I'd decided it was time to leave. I was there mainly for the toys (hot computers to play with.) But I know how they price their services.

[Tigress DEM]

55. Sure, let's fire those responsible...

OK, Teapublicans who voted 40+ times to delay Obamacare implementations, pick up your pink slips.
>>>> From your bosses, the US Citizens who pay your salary which you've failed to earn.
Buh bye now.

Seriously, I mean NOW. Pick up your hats and don't let the door hit your backsides on the way out.

"The president needs to man up, find out who was responsible, and fire them," Nolan said. He did not name anyone.

[Live and Learn]

58. +1 Never going to happen but +1 nonetheless. nt

[ladjf]

56. If this law can be finitely clarified, the software that works in it can and will be clarified to a

point if satisfactory functionality. Programmers take the ideas of man and adapt computer code to those ideas.

Presently, too much time and distraction is being devoted to blaming someone. The sooner the "hearings" mentality can be squelched, the sooner the software system will be "fixed".

[Live and Learn]

59. Of course it can be and has been clarified

and it hasn't even changed, as it will be (all governmental programs are many times overs to the horror of IT).

Finger pointing is a game well honed in these endeavors and perfected, I must say by many contractors. It s a well known point of conversation among governmental IT workers. Often, we are even in awe of how well contractors have perfected their abilities at this function.

[ladjf]

66. Personally I don't know whether or not the law has been clarified to the point that it is ready

to function with computer systems. If it is ready as you say, then we only need to put our best computer systems and software to work to raise the website to a satisfactory level.

[DCBob]

61. Not a good idea to blame the customer.

Federal contractors have to deal with the complexities and whims and politics of the Fed Gov every day in this city. Its just part of the job to deal with it and manage it. No doubt this project was a enormous challenge but t's still the contractor's responsibility to make it clear to the client what the issues are.

Im in IT project management and its my standard policy when in doubt.. delay.

[seabeckind]

73. Which client?

The functional person who must administer the system from the end user standpoint?

Or the IT knowlege worker whose responsibility for the computer system operation existed before the contractor walked in and who will still be there after the contractor leaves?

[Marthe48]

65. Bitch about updated Yahoo

while you're at it. The changes Yahoo made stink, but you won't hear a thing about that. This is such a ridiculous waste of time. Will the Republicans ever get their act together and actually do the work they were elected to do? I doubt if any of the people in Congress have even read the ACA all the way through. It is beyond me how people who administer the government, such as Secretary Sebelius and President Obama can be blamed for a program with glitches in it. Talk to the people who wrote the code and set up the website. And has anyone checked to see if there is a denial of service attack going on at any point? Anyway, even with a huge server, if you get a huge demand, it is going to slow things down.

[dipsydoodle]

69. Which government department would've been reponsible for oversight ?

.

[Jessy169]

70. I'm a website developer -- this is just the usual B.S.

Same old story. Management sets challenging deadlines. Immense complexity of the project naturally leads to human error, which is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid in projects of this size. As the deadline approaches, awareness grows that there are going to be issues, but you MUST meet the deadline, so you put the website out there knowing full well you're going to have issues, but that is just life in the real world. We see the same thing with major game launches -- Skyrim for example, took a while to work the bugs out. Just be patient all you guys, this is the way it works in the real world. The healthcare website will get fixed. Fingers will be pointed back and forth, but the blame generally gets spread around evenly and in hindsight it never matters much anyway. Just be patient -- they'll get it fixed.

[seabeckind]

71. Frustraing issue once again.

As I passed by the teevee this am I saw Blumenthal talking to some pretend liberal on MSNBC. They were discussing the delay of the mandate because of these problems with the web site.

Bullsh1t!!!

Why don't they quit the dam pretending? It is the intent of the gop to eliminate the mandate and thereby kill the ACA. The goal is killing the ACA and shovel more money to the private health insurers and caregougers (caregivers is an oxymoron).

There are 2 issues and we have to quit playing their game. The ACA is a good idea and needs to be implemented as intended. Period.

There are problems with the IT development. Welcome to gov't IT projects of the last 30 years. They all fail. And they fail because the decision makers in the customer arena aren't knowlegeable enough to make intelligent decisions. They wouldn't know a tradeoff in the specs if they stepped in it.

And the contractors know it and count on it. The last thing a contractor wants is to have a guy on the other side of the negotiating table who tells them they are full of sh1t and that their bid is a lie -- and be able to say why.

So the contractor slides a few junkets to the budget guys and tells them that he's the only one who knows the real story.

Next thing you know there's a cast of thousands and no script.

</rant>

[seabeckind]

72. Example of a tradeoff spec:

I have no need to look at the ACA website so any comments I make about its operation are 3rd hand based on anecdotal. Please bear with me.

Someone in another thread said there was a problem with the Experian interface.

Experian was used to verify income. Which prompts a few questions about the need for the interface...

First: Why verify the income? Wouldn't that be a function of the purchase with the private insurer? The ACA doesn't do insurance...it's a gateway.

Second: Assuming the verification is necessary, the fed owns the IRS site also. Why go to Experian, a private entity? Why not just fire off a query to the IRS? Captive audience, captive interface.

Which gets me to my point about the decision making authority and negotiations with the contractor. The "customer" (functional side) identifies the need for the verification. The contractor says that Experian interface is needed.

The functional customer says ok.

The customer (IT guy) says...No. IRS.

[NorthCarolina]

74. To me personally, website glitches are to be expected when new. This is really

such a non-issue on so many levels. Of course, it does add another layer of discourse to help push real issues such as NSA spying into the dark.

[Bluestar]

75. Ridiculous!

The federal government cannot possibly retain or ramp up employees that possess the necessary core competencies for all of their projects. This would be a tremendous waste of money. Federal projects are successfully completed on a regular basis by private contractors, just not this one.

[seabeckind]

76. Name 3.

Maybe the VA Benefits system? It was on Maddow a couple months ago.

How about that FBI system?

"You think you have computer problems? A new system being installed at the FBI is two years behind schedule, $100 million over budget, and still doesn’t have spell check.

The revelation is the latest fiasco in the FBI’s nearly decade-long effort to install a computer system that would help agents track cases and manage evidence. The Department of Justice Inspector General today released a report that found that after spending about $405 million of the $452 million budgeted for the “Sentinel” system, only about half the system is completed. That means that FBI agents, already busy trying to prevent domestic terror, will still have to take time to process 18 case-related forms by hand, print the forms to obtain approval signatures, and maintain hard copy files.

The Sentinel project follows a bungled, three- year, $170 million effort to develop an electronic case management system called the Virtual Case File. The FBI pulled the plug on that effort in 2005, and instead moved ahead with the Sentinel project. But things have been going so badly with Sentinel that last month the FBI decided to take over the project itself, limit the contractor’s role in the system, and finish the project itself in one year."

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/10/more-computer-woes-at-fbi-new-system-late-over-budget/

Etc. Feel free to point to a success.

Tremendous waste of money? BS. That was the argument for contracting out. It was a fudged justification then, just like today.

[Bluestar]

77. Here are nine

outlined in this article[link:http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nine-successful-effective-it-project-tips|

[seabeckind]

79. Nice try but no cigar

What you said was:

"Federal projects are successfully completed on a regular basis by private contractors, just not this one."

I asked you to name 3.

What you replied with was: "Nine successful, effective IT project tips"

Big difference between doing a postmortem of a project and seeing what it did right vs what it did wrong and pointing out an actual project that succeeded...whether it used those elements or not.

BTW, those tips for developers have been floating around for 40 years. The problem is like so many other things. They are written down as if they're a check list...do this and you'll be able to pick up girls sort of things.

The good developers already knew those things and did them before they were written down.

Good developers get in the way of profits for the privatizers.

[Bluestar]

82. My mistake, there were actually seven successful projects

reviewed. Still exceeds three.

After interviewing the CIOs and other department officials in the seven projects it identified as successful - which included programs from the Census Bureau, Defense Information Systems Agency, National Nuclear Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service and Veterans Health Administration -- the GAO came up with nine common factors that were critical to the success of three or more of the seven investments.

[seabeckind]

83. Once again.

What you said was: "Federal projects are successfully completed on a regular basis by private contractors, just not this one."

All the article you cited did was identify agencies where successes had occurred. It did not specify which were contracted out and which were done internally. It also did not give a time frame for those successes. It is entirely possible that the successful project was done long before the big contracting out efforts in the 90's and naughts. It didn't even show which of the individual projects were successful.

As far as the article itself, it is as I pointed out above...a checklist that showed common factors in the successes. What the article doesn't point out is that there were probably failures which followed many of those 9 factors. Success or failure of an abstract endeavor is dependent more upon the personnel involved and to what extent they understand the endeavor and how they interpret the specifications.

This is a good discussion. Thanks very much. Brings back memories from long ago. In fact it reminded me of that big push in the early 90's for the Capability Maturity Model from Carnegie-Mellon.

[Psephos]

95. You're right, but apparently many think, e.g., NSA and TSA prove government competence.

The idea that the USG would have untold thousands of top IT workers already on its payrolls with nothing else to do besides bolt together a massive project on short notice is beyond laughable.

[magical thyme]

78. they did make one valid criticism, which was pointed out here on DU last week...

In general, they are blaming it on overload. But the following is a valid point. Personally, I've rarely seen any kind of commercial website where you needed to create an account to browse through offerings. People want a chance to look through and see what their options are, make their buying decisions and only then go through the hassle of opening an account. That allows plenty of time for review, discussion, etc, without having to go back and forth through logging in or whatever.

Slavitt blamed the administration, saying that a late decision to require consumers to create accounts before they could browse health plans contributed to the overload. "This may have driven higher simultaneous usage of the registration system that wouldn't have occurred if consumers could window-shop anonymously," he said.

[seabeckind]

81. Very good point.

It also meant that a special category had to be created...and then purged somehow when the guy didn't come back.

All kinds of new rules on that category as well as the need for a tickler...how long before you purge? What do you save? Etc.

[seabeckind]

84. Afterthought...

It might help to find out just who made that "late decision" and what prompted it.

I love old movies. Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House was very good.

In that movie the contractor did exactly what the customer asked for...not what the customer needed.

[magical thyme]

85. a post on another thread on GD says it was requested by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid

if that is the case (there was no link), I expect that somebody very high up made the decision to honor those requests, somebody who didn't understand the complexity of the design change or how it would impact end-users on both functional and personal experience levels. Or a GOP infiltrator who saw their chance to sabotage.

[JVS]

92. ROFL!

[IronLionZion]

93. ehealthinsurance.com

share it with people who need insurance but don't need subsidies.

For folks who need subsidies, point them to the phone, mail, or the many physical offices that can sign them up.



In all fairness, the scope really was changing and it is an unbelievably complex system of wildly different database systems and identify/income verification. CGI is taking a PR hit on this that is going to ding their reputation during bids for a long while. The last minute requirement for income/identify verification before seeing the prices (to include the subsidies) is why Dems always lose the PR war. People need to see the prices before and after. People who need subsidies will be patient and go through the hoops to get it. And of course the whole need for a federal system is because red states won't do it. Everybody dropped the ball on this.

But casting blame isn't going to help people sign up for health insurance. And one system malfunctioning should not stop people from getting it. There are ways to help people sign up until the federal site is fixed. And there are many folks in blue states who are having an easier time signing up on their systems.

[quadrature]

96. why is this website even needed?

I buy (state required) car insurance,
without website-help from the state.
(the insurance is approved by the state, btw)

what is so different about health insurance?