Vermont and Massachusetts are getting ready to sue CGI Federal, the contractor that bungled their healthcare sites as well as healthcare.gov:
Massachusetts officials are reviewing legal options against CGI Group, a Montreal-based information technology company, and will make recommendations on how to seek financial redress at a Jan. 9 meeting.
So far, the state has paid $11 million of its $69 million contract with CGI. It will not pay a penny more until a functioning website has been delivered, said Jason Lefferts, spokesman for the Commonwealth Health Connector, the state’s insurance marketplace.
“CGI has consistently underperformed, which is frustrating and a serious concern,” Lefferts said. “We are holding the vendor accountable for its underperformance and will continue to apply nonstop pressure to work to fix defects and improve performance.”
Massachusetts has reverted to using an alternative software system and paper notifications for residents seeking new insurance, a significant black eye for a system that was held up as a national model for providing coverage after it debuted in 2007.
In Vermont, state officials recently alerted CGI that the state is withholding payment of $5.1 million as compensation for the company’s failure to meet key deadlines.
The state is also disputing more than $1 million in charges billed by CGI because of incomplete work that left its insurance website so far behind schedule that Vermonters could not buy coverage online, as promised under Obama’s health care law, until early December, two months after it opened.
As far as I’m concerned, the Obama Administration did the right thing by not pointing fingers while healthcare.gov was floundering–calling out CGI would have risked non-cooperation from them during a critical time, and finger pointing looks weak. But at the point when healthcare.gov is more-or-less working, Obama should have Holder pick out the meanest junkyard dog attorneys at Justice and have them go after CGI hammer and tongs. If a couple of CGI C-level execs need to go to jail pour encourager les autres, so be it. We need to get our money back from these grifters, and we also need to educate the public, who are paying attention now like they’ve never done before, on the stupidity, corruption and waste in the contracting system.
aimai
I agree–if government services are going to be privatized, then those private companies have to face the same penalties as other private companies when they fail to deliver the goods. However, I’m guessing that the company will simply go bankrupt if/when all the liability is assessed and the law suits go forward. If the States are refusing to disburse the money, there’s going to be no money to sue for and the very tech guys who would be needed to do the work of repairing the site and delivering the systems will end up being downsized and fired when the money isn’t coming in.
pseudonymous in nc
But we also need a big change in government IT procurement to ensure that future contracts aren’t as monolithic and subject to single points of failure. There’s no long-term value in using litigation as the back stop to fuck-ups, as is so common in the US. Whatever you think of the current British government — and I have very little love for them — they have committed themselves to a tech model that no longer includes dependency on companies that are better at winning contracts than delivering on them.
Fred Fnord
IIRC, the tech guys are all subcontractors and subsubcontractors, so I dunno that they will be affected by the suit. They can, if the government is willing to do a little effort, be rehired through another contracting company.
Gin & Tonic
Anecdata, I know, but at dayjob we got involved in a fairly large project with CGI (not by choice). While they weren’t the worst contractor we have ever dealt with, just as soon as things got off the ground and were reasonably stable (and we were legally able to do so) we terminated the contract and ended up rewriting almost all of the code they delivered because it just wasn’t good enough. When healthcare.gov shit the bed on its rollout, and it hit the news that CGI was the prime contractor, precisely zero people in IT here expressed any surprise.
Professor
But as we all know, private companies perform better than public entities.
dpm (dread pirate mistermix)
@pseudonymous in nc: Agreed.
pseudonymous in nc
@aimai:
Then you hire them. That goes against the grain in state government, where the aim has been to clear out benefit and pension obligations, but if these services are sufficiently important to need a permanent staff, then you put them on the state books and you build a government technology service that’s focused on and responsive to the needs of the people it serves. That’s especially true for Vermont if it’s going to have that single-payer system in 2017.
schrodinger's cat
@Fred Fnord: A lot of techie sites are blaming Indian programmers on H1-B visas. 99% blame each other while the global 1% get richer.
May be contracting out everything is not such a great idea. Whocoodhadknowed?
Napoleon
But doesn’t Obama have those junkyard dogs going after the crooks on Wall Street.
Just joking, of course he doesn’t.
muricafukyea
Constantly amazed at all the things glorified reddit poster muckymux is an expert on just by reading some article written by some other know nothing nonspert.
James E Powell
But is the alternative to private contractors – shudder – more government employees? Wouldn’t that mean the end of America and Jesus and everything?truly
Anybodybuther2016
@Napoleon: yeah because why go after the guys who fucked up the website when PBO is such a juicy target. Idjit.
muricafukyea
Constantly amazed at all the things glorified reddit poster muckymux thinks he’s an expert on just by reading something some other know nothing nonspert wrote.
Gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
I do not see how doing things in-house is inherently superior to contracting from the point of view of completing a single new project.
Also, when private companies have IT goofs, should the companies sue the programmers in charge for lost profits?
In an industry notorious for over budget, behind schedule screw ups I do not see how to single out the healthcare.gov roll out as an aberration worthy of suing the company responsible for fraud, negligence, etc. like dpm suggests.
Randy P
Past performance is considered in evaluating bids, but it’s only a small part. People have been fiddling with the federal acquisition process for decades, since WW2 at least, and still can’t get it right. Maybe there is no “right” with a purchaser that large.
Baud
Incompetence resulting in breach of contract isn’t criminal. I can see a civil suit, however.
gwangung
@Napoleon: I don’t think that’s quite correct.
nastybrutishntall
@Napoleon: The problem is that what Wall Street was doing was arguably legal. At least, their lawyers will argue so, and George Bush’s legacy Judiciary will agree. So the Dems fuck their golden goose for nothing.
But you already knew that.
aimai
@pseudonymous in nc: Yeah, I’m not arguing that the lawsuits shouldn’t go through or that forcing CGI into bankruptcy would be bad. I’m just wondering what happens next.
Anybodybuther2016
This should’ve been brought up by the “liberals” when they started using an overwhelmed website to attack PBO and members of his administration. I don’t understand how liberals think co-signing negative attacks on this president furthers their cause.
Gene108
@Gin & Tonic:
From my understanding of IT, the architect, leads, managers, etc can vary from project to project in an in-house and/or contracting situation.
So what makes one company’s IT worse than another, since talent moves around from company to company?
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: You can provide more oversight when work is done in house. Contracting out everything is a recipe for disaster, and it does not necessarily save money.
Simple example, you can cook everyday or eat out everyday, most sensible people who want to save money and eat well do a combination of both. But if you have serious dietary concerns it is a good idea to cook at home more often since you control stuff better. So not outsourcing functions vital to the survival of your business is a good idea.
? Martin
@pseudonymous in nc:
This. There’s just no way that the feds aren’t partially at fault here – HHS but also Congress by permitting this procurement system to operate as long as it has. Sure, sue CGI, but it won’t solve the problem at all.
handsmile
@Napoleon: , @nastybrutishntall:
On the subject of DOJ “junkyard dogs going after the crooks on Wall Street,” you might find this essay to be of interest: “The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-level Executives Been Prosecuted?”:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/financial-crisis-why-no-executive-prosecutions/
Its author is Judge Jed Rakoff who sits on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and was appointed thereto by Bill Clinton. In November 2011, Rakoff caused a tremendous stir by rejecting as insufficient a proposed multimillion dollar settlement between the SEC and Citigroup on mortgage-backed securities fraud.
schrodinger's cat
@handsmile: Isn’t the CFTC and SEC grossly understaffed even now?
Gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
I look at contracting more in terms of home renovations, as an analogy.
I could take the time to learn plumbing,electrical and other skills to remodel my kitchen or pay someone to do it for me, who should know what they are doing.
YMMV on the appropriate analogy.
? Martin
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah. I suffer this problem at work. The contractors are not better than in-house because in-house understands the business process VERY well, and that’s that hardest part of this, not the technical stuff.
The reason we don’t do in-house is that we’re balkanized. Rather than a large competent team of developers and support staff that can be tasked with all of the needs, we try and do things out in the smallest units where we can’t justify a full-time person. When we go centrally, they’re unwilling to do tasks that don’t meet the needs of the entire institution. So a Fed pool would be able to do healthcare.gov, but wouldn’t do the shared exchanges, or the red states that are opposed to this would block work in the blue states, etc. So in the end, the only real reason we have the contractor setup is politics.
Roger Moore
@pseudonymous in nc:
The problem is that IT work is inherently subject to single points of failure unless you’re willing to pay a ton of money to develop redundant systems. There’s basically going to be only one web site, one backend, one interchange, etc. If a critical component is FUBAR, the whole thing is FUBAR. The best you can do is to improve your management practices to catch problems while they’re still small and relatively easy to fix, rather than waiting until the thing goes online before finding them.
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: But if your business is plumbing than you better know how to do it, or do something else. So contracting/outsourcing makes sense for some things but not everything.
MattF
Here’s the WaPo profile of CGI Federal:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/meet-cgi-federal-the-company-behind-the-botched-launch-of-healthcare-gov/
Their business strategy:
Paul in KY
I work with CGIers. This does not surprise me.
handsmile
@schrodinger’s cat:
I cannot answer definitively on current SEC/CFTC staffing levels (whatever suspicions I might have), but I do know that House Neo-Confederates have reduced the overall budget, while imposing additional operational constraints, of both agencies since 2010.
i disinterred this 2011 article on the matter from the intertubes, but can find nothing more current:
http://www.complinet.com/compliance/articles/article.html?ref=150747
Meanwhile, the banksters and their bipartisan Congressional employees continue efforts to vitiate Dodd-Frank and Consumer Protection Act regulations.
Paul in KY
@schrodinger’s cat: Excellent points.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
IOW, they want to be like ticks. ETA: Or maybe more like a herpes virus.
KG
@Fred Fnord: just like in construction defect cases, the first thing a prime contractor does when sued is file a cross-complaint against its subcontractors. Indemnity clauses are standard in contracts, they’ll all be a part, their commercial general liability carriers will appoint counsel, they’ll do some discovery and then they’ll pay
Fuzzy
The U.S. Government should treat ALL subcontractors the same as CGI. Make them perform and rewrite the contracts. This should include all the military pork.
Cassidy
One of the things that gets forgotten in this contracting discussion is that the rules are written for “fairness”. It simply isn’t possible, or legal, to go straight to the industry expert and purchase a service from them.
burnspbesq
@schrodinger’s cat:
Handsmile is equivocating because a straight answer undermines his preferred narrative, but the straight answer is yes. DOJ, SEC, CFTC, CFPB, and IRS have all been starved by the GOP-controlled budget process.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Napoleon: http://www.stopfraud.gov/
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodinger's cat
@burnspbesq: That’s the impression I got just by looking at how many people they are hiring. They haven’t increased their hiring by much which is something they need to do if they are going to do a good job of enforcing Dodd-Frank.
handsmile
@burnspbesq:
Pray tell, just what is my “preferred narrative”? And in what way am I “equivocating?”
Oh and since you seem to have the time, there’s a question awaiting your answer on today’s earlier “Useful Links’ thread.
ericblair
@Fuzzy:
The govvies are supposed to be making the contractors perform; it’s their job. There’s a lot of crappy contract management in the Federal government, and it gets worse in state and local governments. Some of this is due to the fact that a lot of the government civilians got forced over time from a technical role into a supervisory role they aren’t much good at. Sure, the government can mod the contracts, but they have to make sure they’re actually making the situation better, and you’re going to have to pay for changing plans in midstream. If you’ve ever made change requests on a home improvement contract, you’ll know what generally happens.
Government contracting regulations and implementation gets tinkered with all the time. There’s been a huge push away from cost-plus contracting, because it’s Bad, and away from time-and-materials for similar reasons, to fixed-price contracts. The theory is that the fixed-price contracts (we pay you $X for working product) is supposed to save money over paying contractor costs plus overhead. However, the government ends up getting what it asked for instead of what it needs (see “crappy contract management” above), and means that any changes do mean contract mods. Doesn’t seem to save any money, either, because generally the contractors are far better at doing pricing than the government is. Plus, there is less interaction between the government and the contractor, since the govvies don’t want to end up doing the contractors’ work for them and the contractors don’t want the govvies interfering in contractual delivery.
MattR
@Gene108:
If they were billing for services not performed or something similar, then I could undestand the fraud charge. But otherwise, I completely agree.
@schrodinger’s cat: @Gene108: I don’t think any of your analogies do a good job of accoutning for the individual quirks of each IT project, despite their similarity to previous projects. The closest I can come is lawyers – who see huindreds of similar yet different cases. They can use their expertise from past cases to help with the present one, but they can’t just copy the same briefs or make the exact same arguments. Similarly, they can’t guarantee how long the proceedings will take, how many hours they will have to bill or what the result will be (they can only make estimates based on their experience)
The other thing worth pointing out is that tools and tecnology in IT are constantly changing – adding features, making things faster or more scalable to hangle large amounts of data, etc. If a company does not evolve with those changes, they will be out of business. Very few people want a website with the features and speed of 2004 even if it can be built on time and under budget. So by necessity, IT companies cannot just keep using the same exact formula/methodology over and over, even if it has been working.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Napoleon: @muricafukyea:
Just thought I’d fire off an easy doubleplus fuck you.
Schlemizel
I know this is not an open thread but I am at work so I have limited access. A friend sent this to me & I think its a pretty decent idea for a thread of its own:
http://gawker.com/the-least-important-writers-of-2013-1485816864
hartly
Does the international angle put up any hindrances to filing or at least winning a lawsuit? In what court can the USA or any of the States on its own sue a Canadian company and what are the chances of winning the suit?
The Red Pen
Good, modern software development practices have not penetrated Federal IT. You can bring them in (TDD/Agile etc.), but the client doesn’t really care — or may even force you into a waterfall methodology.
It’s like you walk into a filthy kitchen and tell the people, “You would have fewer sick customers if you’d just clean up and wash your hands,” and they’re all, “We didn’t budget for that.”
raven
@Schlemizel: Every thread is an open thread except maybe Richard the insurance wizard.
raven
I keep getting duplicate posts, WTF-K?
max
We need to get our money back from these grifters, and we also need to educate the public, who are paying attention now like they’ve never done before, on the stupidity, corruption and waste in the contracting system.
Concur. You expect a new website of this size (particularly one involving insurance of all things) to have issues. But the lack of pre-release testing indicates big fuckups here and that looks like CGI. Screw those guys.
@muricafukyea: Constantly amazed at all the things glorified reddit poster muckymux thinks he’s an expert on just by reading something some other know nothing nonspert wrote.
I am constantly amazed by the limp dick flamers that appear here. Clue: grammar is your friend. Of course, that probably doesn’t help much since you don’t seem to actually speak English.
max
[‘Asswipe.’]
srv
I’m wondering what is different about this Congress.
ericblair
@hartly:
CGI Federal is a Virginia subsidiary of CGI, and bought out another local contractor. This is how it usually works. Airbus/EADS is a European company, but has a US subsidiary that does the US federal government work. In that case, they can do highly classified projects where the non-US upper management can’t be briefed on the details.
raven
@srv: Been under a rock?
schrodinger's cat
@MattR: My example was not specific to IT consulting, but contracting/outsourcing in general. That it is not wise to farm out stuff that is vital to your survival as a business for short term cost-cutting.
ericblair
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, it’s not, and it’s a pretty regular occurrence to see the government let the contractor handle everything for a specific function, then let the contract expire and the entire knowledge base go away. It’s not like the government could get it back if they wanted to, since the contractor’s team has probably scattered to the winds to new projects.
srv
Obama should just blame the Canadians and invade British Columbia.
Not just any Canadians, but FRENCH Canadians. This is an act of war.
schrodinger's cat
@ericblair: I wonder how many dollars this short sightedness has cost businesses and the government over the years in both dollars and in terms of time.
Elie
@Anybodybuther2016:
sigh —
So true and I am so tired.. Why would any Democrat ever again try to do anything big or make any big needed change with a peanut gallery just waiting for any mistake or imperfection as a reason to completely repudiate the initiative?
I tell ya, I’m starting to dislike them MORE than the crazy teahadists….
Yatsuno
@max: Durfs gotta Durf after all. And to make it worse: he’s Canuckistani. But he thinks he’s keeping JC honest, or something. Mostly he just comes in and shits one line then runs off again. Pathetic doesn’t cover it.
Cassidy
Is the Bobo of Balloon Juice gonna start another thread or is his shift over?
johnny aquitard
@MattR:
Not even close.
Software engineering unlike law is not a profession.
Unlike law or engineering or medicine or architecture there is no peer-reviewed board certified standard of practice whose legal authority ultimately comes from the State. No board to oversee the licensing of the programmer professional to practice his profession. No state-mandated and legally enforced obligation to pay the fuck attention to life safety issues.
No professional insurance for software malpractice. No ethics of conduct or obligation toward society or the public a professional is bound to address.
And above all, no professional and legal obligations that for an incompetent or negligent practitioner could result in criminal or civil penalties, including jail or loss of license (which effectively ends the professional’s career and livelihood.)
The incompetent and negligent programmer will face no peer review from their licensing board, no legal repercussions — without a standard of practice how does one show someone failed to meet it? Sure the outcome was terrible, people got hurt but was that due to a failure to do due dilligence?
When programmers are held to a similar standard real professionals are, then you will see improved software. You will see more responsible estimates and responsible claims of what can be done given a particular domain problem and a certain amount of time, money and resources.
You can have rogue software companies all you want, run by all the sociopathic asshole CEOs you want; no professional programmer would work for one. They’d be disbarred out of a career in one project.
(We should hold CEOs accountable too but that seems impossible to put even the most criminal ones on probation let alone federal prison.)
There are huge life safety issues now with software, as big as with any of the professions I mentioned. And no public interest is being safeguarded here.
When a building falls down or a bridge collapses or a patient goes home with a hemostat sewn up inside him, then there is hell to pay and it comes down to practictioner who was responsible for it. Someone, some professional, ultimately is held responsible. For software, there are no professionals; no developer is responsible if your site crashes. Even if such a site affects peoples’ lives, health and well-being.
Violet
@Cassidy: Who’s “the Bobo of Balloon Juice”?
Cassidy
@Violet: mix
Gene108
@johnny aquitard:
I not sure about malpractice insurance, but you can get E&O insurance for IT.
Violet
@Cassidy: Who gave him that name?
The Dangerman
I don’t know how you’d ever find it in the code, but I suspect some ratfucking in the process (look through security tapes and see if they hired James O’Keefe as a contractor).
Baud
@Violet:
I’m going to guess that Cassidy did.
mclaren
Once again, the balloon-juice commentariat reliably afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfortable. Given a society-wide problem that destroys the lives of tens of a millions of a people and a minor annoyance, the balloon-juice commentariat rises with righteous anger to thunder in biblical wrath against the minor annoyance, while remaining mute about the vast society-wide problem.
You people should be climbing the White House fence shouting for Obama to indict the financial criminals who are destroying America. Instead, you whimper about some ferkakta website that slightly inconvenienced you.
You speak and act like born serfs, ladies and gentlemen. May you wear your chains lightly, and smile beatifically in your abject servitude.
Yatsuno
@mclaren: You know, sometimes you almost have a point. Then it gets devastated by your inherent urge to engage in hyperbole and ad hominem attack. What are you trying to accomplish by posting this? I’m asking honestly.
MattR
@johnny aquitard: Apparently in the editing process, I lost the sentence that said that there are no good analogies to the IT industry. I meant that lawyers were as close of one that I could think of, not that it was actually all that close. You point out some valid distinctions between the two professions, but I find some of your criticisms and value judgements about the IT industry to be overblown.
Because lawyers are known for the precision of the cost estimates they provide their clients for complex cases and it never takes longer, costs more or requires more effort than the initial estimate.
Baud
@Yatsuno:
You’ve just described half the Internet.
MattR
@mclaren: Yeah. No commenters at Balloon Juice would ever suggest that Wall Street criminals be held accountable for those actions. Except of course, all of those who argued for that exact thing in one of today’s previous posts.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Yatsuno:
Don’t expect anything much in return.
Violet
@mclaren:
Can you let us know when you did this? Are there photos? Would love to hear your stories of how it went.
Violet
@Baud: You’re probably right. Is it supposed to mean something?
Baud
@Violet:
Not to me, but I don’t even know where the nym dpm came from.
Violet
@Baud: I don’t know where that came from either. I figure it must be a play on Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride but I don’t know how.
Chuckles
From a political standpoint, this is a bad idea. 100% guaranteed multi-month election-year bonanza for Republicans. Do you guys think for a second that CGI can’t make dozens of people in the executive branch look underqualified to play the role they played in managing this thing? especially considering that many of them probably actually were? There’s no such thing as a failed technology project that has just one side to blame. The client needs to have reasonable mitigation strategies (including a beta test and delaying the g-damn launch, for instance) to deal with the always-real possibility that a contractor can’t come close to delivering what they promise. Even when one side is to blame, they don’t believe it and will come up with an enormous amount of plausible-sounding documentation and justification. There will be no way for the more tech-savvy reporters, much less a non-technical news audience, to discern whether CGI’s inevitable protestations of incomplete specs, slow decision making, late requirement changes, etc., are BS or if they are valid. I’ve been a programmer for almost twenty years, and I’ve read a fair amount about this, and there’s no way I could tell without actually seeing the specs and the specific communications in question. But my feeling is that the single worst thing that CGI did was to agree to do something they should have known was impossible. Objectively, they deserve to be sued for that, but also: paying somebody to do something a competent client would know was impossible isn’t exactly a heroic achievement. Politically, suing them for that is suicide. There is not that much value to proving in a court of law that someone else is mostly responsible for a colossal disaster, and oh yeah, I guess we were 25% responsible, too. 25% of colossal is still a pretty damn big screw-up.
I imagine I’ll be stuck in moderation and I’m too late to the party for many people to respond, but for any other programmers who want to say “it’s an easy site”, consider the largest team you’ve worked with and the largest client bureaucracy you’ve dealt with. If you’ve never worked on a team where you were depending on dozens of people whose names you never learned, or spent more than 3 weeks trying to find the right person to answer a simple question on the client side, you haven’t really worked on this kind of project. On a project like this, the visible features are orders of magnitude easier than the process you have to go through to get your data, your sign-offs, and your basic answers. On another level, I totally agree: in an unrealistically frictionless environment, a team of 5 great programmers could probably have done this job. But a “team” of 1000+ people thrown together ad hoc is guaranteed to fail, even if they’re all brilliant, and especially if their client isn’t savvy enough to know this.
Chuckles
@efgoldman: Haven’t ever posted before on this computer, wasn’t sure if I was using the same account name as before. Last time I commented (sometime over a year ago), I got stuck in moderation for some reason I never figured out, though I thought it might be because I’d used a different account name for the same email address or something.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Violet: I think it goes back to the Silk Road stories earlier this year – http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/silk-road-raided/
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cervantes
@burnspbesq:
Really? What do you mean?
BubbaDave
@Gene108:
But if you own 1000 rental houses spread across the city, it becomes worth your while to have on staff somebody who knows the basics of plumbing, electrical repair et cetera. Sure, if one of the houses gets totally trashed by a tenant you’ll still need to augment your staff with some contractors, or if a hurricane means you need to replace 80 roofs at once, but you want to have enough staff to deal with the everyday stuff.
The Federal government is huge. There is always some sort of project going on that needs IT support. Therefore, the Feds should have a core group of staff programmers and project managers who can handle the regular levels of activity. Sure, a massive project like healthcare.gov will still need contractors to bulk up the team — but if the core group actually reports to Uncle Sam instead of the contractor you have a fighting chance of getting the work done close to right, close to deadline, and close to budget. Lack those people and you’re begging to be taken to the cleaners.
BubbaDave
@Chuckles:
Speaking as an IT guy who manages much smaller projects, it was always going to be difficult. That said,
1) The Feds need a core staff of experienced project managers. I don’t care if you’re paying them $200k/yr to sit around waiting for projects to manage, any PM worth his or her salt could have saved enough on healthcare.gov to pay for an entire 20-year career.
2) The Feds need to figure out some way to issue contracts that can work with an Agile methodology. Waterfall doesn’t work when the customer doesn’t know the full scope of the project, and the Feds almost never know the full scope of the project.
3) Somewhere in the project someone was responding to bad news by shooting the messenger, which is why POTUS was going around in September talking up a site that was about to be an epic disaster. That’s a cultural problem that needs to be addressed.
4) 70% of IT projects come in late, over budget, or both. 30% actually screw up so badly that they just get canceled. Healthcare.gov is a pretty typical example of what happens when a traditional enterprise– private, government or academic– tries an ambitious IT project. In the end, it seems to have shaken out to “mostly working.” Could have gone a lot better, and it’s a black eye for liberal technocrats everywhere, but four years from now when Republicans are running ads demonizing Democrats for wanting to cut ACA spending ain’t nobody going to care about a horrific website launch.
Chuckles
@BubbaDave: I don’t think I disagree with much of what you’re saying. My main point is that putting CGI on defensive in a lawsuit will literally require them to release a lot of embarrassing information about the government. Some of it will be ridiculous or misleading, and some of it legitimate but blown out of proportion, but all of it will amount to an awful lot of election-year attention on something that can easily be portrayed as embarrassing to Democrats. The right thing from a good-governance standpoint could be an awful thing from an electoral politics standpoint. Leading to more Republicans in office, leading to worse governance.
glasnost
I don’t agree with this. Who really knows what happened, but from what I can tell a very large part of the problem was the total lack of knowledge (years-delayed political stalling) on which states would be in or out of the exchange until all of nine months ago, and a very large amount of waffling, internal inconsistency, changing requirements, the vast postponing of critical, implementation-dependent decisions, on the government side – and most of the rest of the problem was that this was an inherently really hard thing to do. Not the front end, but the automation of a very very large number of very very complicated rules, with the selection of which rules applied varying based on which states were in the exchange.
It’s not clear to me that some other contractor – and I do mean any other contractor – in this country could have done a better job. I don’t like corrupt or incompetent contractors, but I put most of the blame on HHS flat-out fucking this up. Let’s face it – it’s the government’s job to demand testing, to delay the launch to make time for it, and furthermore, not to delay decisions that have to be made before making the website to such an extent that testing becomes more or less impossible.
Or to choose not to do those things.
The admin fucked this up. I hate privateering as much as anyone, but to pin this on CGI without evidence that there really was incompetence here – not just “wasn’t able to meet goals under incompetent, accidentally self-destructive exogenous circumstances imposed by the government”, I’m calling this mindless belligerence.
william wesley
@Yatsuno:
What he is trying to say is that its not what you do about fashionable problems that matters, what matters is which problems you choose to make fashionable. Its irritating when people become distracted by a knee jerk hot button media moment issue instead of the most important major issues, most of us could pay our medical bills without Obama care if wall street were not ripping us all off. Its like having to endure a friend who claims to care about their car and who constantly frets about the doors not being clean but who ignores the smoke poring from under their hood, the discrepancy is irritating, the supposed responsibility is really the reverse. It almost makes the whole discussion look like a tactic employed by a magician, wall street makes the books vanish once again because everyone’s attention was diverted by some bauble, the indiscretion can incite anger when it approaches the appearance of collusion, Wall Street is praying for diversionary issues, why give them satisfaction?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Gene108:
The only thing that distinguished healthcare.gov from 80% of all software rollouts was the visibility of the project.
And the failures weren’t just with the code; the whole project was a cluster on both the .gov and private sides. Ars Technica detailed the “seven deadly sins” of the project:
Reason number 4 is the biggest, deadliest sin IMO. You can’t keep changing requirements during development. At least as much blame should be fixed on the .gov project managers as the contractors. Should we sue the government as well?
The whole philosophy behind .gov IT needs to change.
Original Lee
@Baud: If, however, their certifications were fudged (as I have heard from other IT contractors), then this would be an appropriate response.