We've to implement this software before we can debug it!
Posted on 10/22/2013 9:02:13 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The administration’s effort to respond to the catastrophic rollout of the federal Obamacare exchange seems at this point to consist of having special teams of IT experts from inside and outside the government — in the president’s words, “the best and the brightest” — come in and help fix the Healthcare.gov site.
Even if you put aside the fact that the phrase “the best and the brightest” was popularized by the title of a David Halberstam book about how smart people can do stupid things (in that case, mismanage American foreign policy and march the nation into the Vietnam War), this idea seems very problematic.
Anyone who has been part of a federal project that involves technical work performed by contractors has got to be shaking his head today at the vision of outsiders swooping into a massive project and fixing complex mistakes. The attempt to integrate new people with very high opinions of their own technical prowess into this mind-numbingly complicated undertaking will involve a lot of unpleasant meetings that waste the time of people who should be working on the site, the endeavor will be severely hamstrung by the basic character of federal contracting work (in which the four corners of the contract are everything and rules matter more than goals), and it will all only delay the inevitable end game — which is that the contractors who screwed this up will need to be the people who unscrew it, they will do it slowly and clumsily, and they will get paid handsomely by the taxpayer for the additional work.
I think the idea that Silicon Valley types are going to rescue the bureaucracy confuses two kinds of technical mastery: experimental innovation and consolidated management. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses, but these two visions generally do not play well together. Successful technology firms do a huge amount of trial and error, avoid over-management, and create adaptive knowledge systems that work by learning and are constantly tested against competitors. The federal bureaucracy develops and enforces uniform rules meant to apply technical knowledge it (thinks it) already possesses to a complex and chaotic world to make it simpler and more orderly — to make it do the bidding of policymakers. As Max Weber put it, “bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.” The maxim of the Internet age is closer to “liberation through knowledge.”
The former vision is built on the premise that the modern age is defined by the immense growth of technical knowledge and expertise and a key role of our social and political institutions is to apply that knowledge and expertise to society to make it more rational. The latter vision is built on the premise that the modern age is defined by every individual’s overwhelming ignorance (or as Hayek put it, his reliance on knowledge he does not possess) and a key role of our social and political institutions is to enable local knowledge to be consolidated in practice through innumerable individual trials and errors that add up to practical progress but not to centralized expertise. Think of it as applying expert knowledge vs. channeling social knowledge. It’s the difference between how the left and the right think about a lot of policy questions, very much including health care.
That doesn’t mean the problems with Healthcare.gov can’t or won’t be solved, of course. But it probably means they won’t be solved by infusing Silicon Valley brilliance into the process. The spirit in which this site was created was like the spirit the law seeks to impose on the health-care system: managerial, not innovative. Its early problems are almost enough to make you think that maybe the federal government shouldn’t have too much control over a health-care system badly in need of innovation and efficiency, aren’t they?
And where will Obama get the additional funds?
Will he ask the DOJ to extort (I mean retrieve) the money paid to CGI? If he can get 13 Billion from JP Morgan...........
Government has been hiring the best and brightest for decades now. Is that why things are so messed up?
I’ve often wondered why there aren’t any Texas A&M, U of MI or U of Chicago law school graduates on the Supreme Court.
Great movie. (Glad someone “got it”)
We need to send in a Spec Forces Tiger Team to clean out the nest. Some suggest nuking it from orbit as being the only way to be sure.
With any software system, there "should be" ample documentation to describe the system, its requirements, design, security, etc. I say "should be," because documentation is usually only as good as the sponsor or project leader demands it to be. If expectations of quality and maintainability are high, the quality of the documentation should also be high.
If the system is half-assed, or there are no expectations for quality, or no one is checking up on documentation, it should be readily apparent.
If I was on the House Committee investigating this failure, I would tell Sebelius to bring all the HealthCare.gov documentation.
My point is, reading through, and understanding a well-documented system can take several months alone. They can't just expect a team to come to Washington for a week, tweak a few lines of code, and then be on their way.
RE :We need to send in a Spec Forces Tiger Team to clean out the nest. Some suggest nuking it from orbit as being the only way to be sure.
You mean the nest where all the software bugs live and breed ? LOL
Oh...another outsourced company they can’t subpoena! How convenient.
1) A demanding, focused, flexible, professional approach to technical design and SW development -- whether the approach is strictly "Agile" or not -- such as that used by Apple or Google (to name just two) would greatly benefit the US government which really has a lot of trouble with technology. The feds suceed in building advanced systems ONLY because they throw vast resources at problems until they eventually work (or not). Private industry tends to be more efficient by several orders of magnitude.
2) The government will not allow any movement in this direction. They know better. They've been doing it a certain way for the past 40 years. You didn't fill out form 7613-b. And this needs to be authorized by 5 levels of management above your head before you can even think about starting. And oh by the way, we just changed the requirements. Again.
It’s clear they hired canada’s worst and dullest to build the thing initially. proven track record of massive fail on nationwide system.
which makes me believe besides having big donors involved in the company, the whole effort was designed to fail.
So there’d be a crisis to push people into single payer right away “for their sake, so they aren’t without insurance”. An “insurance katrina/sandy” so to speak.
They aren’t dumb, they knew this company sucked and failed at a large nationwide database type project. to the extent they repealed the law up there.
I believe this is exactly what obama wants. so he can push single payer.
think about it a while. it’s all been talk. they knew what they did pass, all brought around single payer ultimately. how it would affect private companies. some have gone out of business already anticipating obamacare. they’ve screwed up doctors and hospitals prior to it actually being implemented.
the effects to help bring about single payer have occurred without them having the law actually implmenet anything.
they never were going to design a working (well and correct) website. they designed it to only handle 50,000 people a day nationwide - impossible to get 16 million people covered by their deadline without penalties. it’s all on purpose. it’s another crisis to exploit with a radical and fast solution and doing a runaround on congress.
it’s yet another crisis in the crisis smorgasbord. They have always wanted single payer. obamacare shrunk the number of players and shrunk out those that wouldn’t play along.
many of those left won’t mind being rolled into a single payer system, being “patriotic” and becoming part of the government health system.
It’s not a far cry. They’ve nationalized medicine, to nationalize the medical insurers under the umbrella of “single payer” isn’t a stretch. Look at what he’s all done and say it’s a stretch.
He’s always wanted single payer. the obamacare emerging debacle/crisis will allow him to get it. Because “something MUST be done” for all the poor people without insurance now. People will DIE if we don’t do SOMETHING. Mark my words.
Any conservative on the coding team should sacrifice his career and code bugs and viruses all over the system.
Sabotage it!
That gummi looks like it rolled around the bathroom floor awhile.
Also, if it isn’t tested (and this one obviously was not) it isn’t documented. Documentation is the low man on the totem pole.
BTW, I’m a Lead Business Systems Analyst. Some of our work involves documenting legacy systems that have been working well for a while without it.
i.e. I’d like to see them ask Sebelius to bring the documentation just to see the position she fell in when she fainted.
RE: It’s clear they hired canada’s worst and dullest to build the thing initially. proven track record of massive fail on nationwide system.
I think they hired the Canadian company for one important reason — THEY ARE USED TO BUILDING A SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM.
You could almost infer..... that the insurance industry wants no part of zerocare. If they did, they would have written the code and it would have worked.
American Healthcare getting punked by some Canadian idiots... was it planned that way?
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