Posted on 10/25/2013 3:43:13 PM PDT by Ramius
One in six IT projects face out of control costs, and bring much disruption, making them 'black swans'
WASHINGTON - Despite partisan sniping over the Affordable Care Act, members of a U.S. House committee probing the problems at Healthcare.gov Thursday asked some tough, IT-specific questions that revealed some key facts.
Two members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, U.S. Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), were especially focused on the testing process for the ACA website that's had problems since its launch on Oct. 1.
It turns out that project's 55 contractors had only two weeks to conduct end-to-end testing of Healthcare.gov prior to launch.
"What's the recommended industry standard for end-to-end testing," asked Walden.
"Months would be nice," said Andrew Slavitt, executive vice president of Optum, one of the contractors that built the site. Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI Federal and a witness, perhaps the largest contractor on the project, agreed with Slavitt.
The contractors for the site all said they performed their part of the project as required while making it clear that they weren't responsible for the overall outcome of Healthcare.gov.
None could say, with any certainty, when the website will perform as designed. There was no one from the federal government to explain the project's IT decision-making, though federal officials are expected to testify as early as next week.
The problems at Healthcare.gov may qualify as a black swan event, something that's difficult to predict and is disruptive. A black swan event in Mother Nature might include a solar geomagnetic storm that knocks out sensitive electronics and power grids. In IT, a black swan event is a project with out-of-control costs, and consequences so severe that it may cause a company to fail.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
The lyrics to this song seem perfect.
Thom Yorke - Black Swan (Language)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJhmKF4npMs
Because, then, the government can't control the process -- the subsidies, in particular.
Moreover, the bulk on the enrollment via the federal websites to date have been in Medicaid -- which doesn't involve the insurance companies.
In other words, there'd be no "free stuff"...
I wondered why they didn’t use an already built government system for the healthcare.gov website.
I think it must more correctly be called “Black Satan”.
What the hell is a ‘black swan?”
Never mind. I looked it up.
“The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.”
Don’t use words that I don’t understand.
some more rules about systems from John Gall:
1) Primal scenario of government systems based on basic data of experience: government systems in general work poorly or not at all, because no large complicated or complex systems ever work properly.
2) Fundamental theorem of government systems: new systems generate new problems and therefore systems should not be unnecessarily multiplied
3) Law of growth: government systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach and oppress.
4) generalized uncertainty principle: large complex systems produce unexpected outcomes and the total behavior of large systems cannot be predicted
5) Le Chatelier's principle: complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function
6) The operational fallacy: the system itself does not do what it says it is doing
7) laws of function:
7a) a complex system cannot be made to work. It either works or it doesn't
7b) Pushing on the system doesn't help.It must makes things worse
8) failure mode theorems:
8a) complex government systems usually operate in failure mode
8b) a complex government system can fail in an infinite number of ways
8c) the mode of failure or a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure
8d) the larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure
I think they’re pushing on a rope here.
LOL!
Baghdad Bob and Obama are one and the same.
You program a bad process you get a automated bad process.
I have worked in IT for over 20 years and I can tell you, based on how this was set up, with the timelines, and the people/groups involved, that this was a totally predictable outcome.
We all saw the train wreck coming...
But the Black Swan event maybe the consequences of the train wreck. It could go extreme in a number of ways... From full on socialism and a permanent death spiral to a major rejection of government and a return to sanity.
It’s a dirty bird, that’s for sure.
Yep... Then you know. There are those projects that, in the very first requirements meeting with the client, that creepy feeling comes up your spine and you know way, way in advance that disaster is looming.
Yes...and they are all licensed by their state...involving a comprehensive 3 hour exam on all aspects of insurance, ethics and a background check.....every piece of mail, phone contacts and adverts has to be prior approved by their office manager....also follow up exams every year....
Obamacare Navigators get none of this...
Spokeshave who was a former insurance agent.
Black swan? Isn’t that racis’?
Why on earth would they need to make their own website to duplicate the sale of insurance by private insurers to the public? Can’t you get your ‘ObamaCare’ compliant policy directly from the insurer and save yourself weeks of headache?
Because they couldn’t data mine those sites to get the info they needed for their push on 2014 elections.
I have worked in IT for over 20 years and I can tell you, based on how this was set up, with the timelines, and the people/groups involved, that this was a totally predictable outcome.
And I bet you didn’t earn 600 million over that time period for delivering a faulty product. :):):)
Observed behavior is nonlinear; I suggest a different model: chaos.
I’m no IT guy but have been involved enough in system installs, upgrades and replacements, both successful and less than ideal, to know that starting at the end with desired outputs and working back to front from there, going through every input and touchpoint to the beginning of a process works far better than believing anything anyone says about how a system will perform on the front end as a result of assumptions based upon capabilities. Run your flowchart backwards and never assume a thing will work unless field tested or simulated based upon actual data and conditions.
They didn’t know what their inputs or their outputs would be, sounds like. Couldn’t even plan for capacity on the website despite knowing that there would be a heavy volume initially. I can’t escape concluding that it was never intended to function as billed. It paid off cronies with hundreds of millions. It inflicts pain and demand for a better solution, which of course always involves more government to government bureaucrats. Single payer.
Ping
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