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?
Good deal lets pay for it 2x’s maybe 3
Too big to fail is too big to work.
Obamacare, TO BIG TO FAIL ! so they put more resources on it.
If they have any issues, they can call their special help line at
0118 999 881 99 9119 725.........3.
Snowden’s available for a get out of jail card.
Just wow.
How on earth will the clueless one determine who is the brightest?
They call them Tiger Teams.
Standard Federal government disaster fire drill.
They will be busy a while.
Too bad they cant hide it and procecute whistleblowers as they did here
Will they be the same crowd of irresponsible and stupid geeks who hand out US national security secrets like popcorn?
He has not a clue. And he is demonstrating it with every move on this calamity.
Explanation:
When a project goes south, you can’t just bring in new, “smart” blood to fix it and think it’s gonna be fine.
This whole thing is almost like a much ballyhoo’d manned Mars launch that crashed and burned on the platform because of many and diverse systemic failures. You don’t bring in an “extra special smart” team of guys and try it again in a few weeks.
It will take years.
.... Now here's a thought ...... Why didn't Skippy consider hiring them to build the site in the first place instead of throwing 600 million taxpayer dollars at a failed foreign company with a record of incompetence?
Ditch Initech, bring in Initrode.
So, does this mean they didn’t have the best and brightest develop it? Hmm, that’s such a surprise (not).
"We...fixed the glitch."
Mmmmmmm....the stupid O team will naturally assume all the IT's are avid O worshippers, dying to glorify O....
......just like the cronies that screwed it up did.
ROTFL.
O team might be in for a big surprise.
Obama’s already spent a half billion dollars on this mess ... He didn’t start with people who knew what they were doing because with dems it’s always cronies and incompetents first...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.