As a fellow IT person I wanted to offer some thoughts on the debacle of the health care site.
Having been involved in projects associated with private and government agencies and having followed the Obama administration let me offer the following. The Obama administrations aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers and their obsession with secrecy in their invasion of everyone else's privacy is indicative of an insular administration. Add to this the fact that Obama has no experience in management. So some dubious "think" type consultant helped them brain storm originally about all the miracle things that the web can do so they develop their fantasy web site. Then the companies that want the contract promise whatever it takes to get the contract feeling that once the client is committed it is hard to get out of things. Forget about the KISS principle or being cautious in terms of design by emphasizing reliability and ease of use as top priorities. Then when things start to go wrong, the Obama people who think they are god disregard the bad news that things are not going to happen as planned by simply telling the underlings, you tell those <put in your favorite expletive> that they will get done what they were told to get done. The apparent style of this white house, the imperial solution is probably standard operation. There is the basic bureaucratic fear of telling the people above you bad news so the message becomes increasingly muffled as it climbs. Then when the project does not launch on time, management is outraged but they are too far along to do anything but throw money at the problem. In the case of public institutions that are spending public money, the work to try to get money out of the contractor requires too much time and too much additional money that even if they can get it will not be for years during the usual protracted litigation and usually there are enough documentaed problems of change orders to make the issue of responsibility murky so it is unclear if litigation will even succeed. So they just pay the vendor and continue or they kill the project and start over. It was absurd that the Obama people at the white house understood the seriousness of the problem until it was well into the launch. Anyway, as a fellow IT guy I thought it would be interesting if you blogged about what you think about this debacle. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
