Re: MSNBC’s Ezra Klein Blasts Obamacare ‘Management Failure’: Website Problems ‘Got S
True, but . . . .
As the old adage goes, it seems that too many cooks spoiled the broth (too many subcontractors). Worse, the federal exchange seems to be set up to access other federal databases as part of the verification/calculation process (IRS, perhaps Soc. Sec., etc)... odds are all these databases are of differing types (if so, another general problem with federal I.T.). Lastly, it seems no one was in charge (i.e., project manager). Stir well and season until total disaster, and that seems to be what we have.
This is close. It is more like too many chiefs. You have to have about 20 bosses telling you what they want done, and some of those things are directluy conflicting, and when you are doing the work you have to play this game of kiss ass. Then you have the reality a ton of these people have little to no actual skill with what they are doing. There are people who have a skill with these sorts of things, and then you have a lot of people who have a degree. This is one of my big beefs with college, a degree does not mean a damn thing. In my first IT job there was a guy with a masters in computer science who did not know what TCP/IP was. The guy doing the interview actually walked out of the room laughing at the applicant. A few weeks later they put this other kid on my team with an MCSE and a bachelors and the guy did not know what a Hard drive or RAM looked like. Over and over you run into these people who are incapable opf doing the job, but they can talk a good game so they end up screwing up the works and making things much harder. It really does not help when I am sure they are working across different contractors and different teams.
I never expected a nation wide system to roll out without a disaster. There may be some teams in certain corporations that could do something this massive and have it operational on a certain day, but most rollouts happen over months and years and the problems are addressed slowly. Yes, this is a terrible way to have implemented it and it should have rolled out a lot slower adding functionality and states over time, but it was not going to go that way because they needed a pure date to go live with everything. Now they have to fix it while it is up and running, and they probably have some new software written for it that people have to be brought up to speed on.
Over the years so-called IT (information technology) seems to have gotten worse. Websites are very pretty, they have lots of video and stuff (that seems to intrude upon you without you first asking for it), and they seem to crash more often every year. DOS never crashed (that I recall... and if it did it took about 6 seconds to reboot it). Windows gets worse with every release (Windows 3.1 was the last stable version, about 30 years ago). Java works about as well as pouring the real thing on your keyboard. Even if they had done the federal exchange correctly, the creaky mess that may be the rest of the federal IT structure might have choked it to death (as actually may be the case... for more seemingly informed reading see
Here’s Why Healthcare.gov Broke Down - ProPublica ).
Sorry dude, but windows can be very stable, even Me. No you can not get the operability of modern technology through DOS or 3.1 Not to mention you are really missing the mark with what is actually problems with the server/client software and not the OS in particular. There is a difference between crashing a program and crashing an OS today that was not the case in the two versions you mentioned. Windows has improved their threading over the years and stabilized their system so you can shut down processes without making the system bug out. The only blue screen my windows 7 box has ever seen was memory corruption in the swap file due to bad sectors on the hard disk. I would still hope they are using something better than windows on the back end, but the problems that are coming about seem more localized to poorly written client programs. This is also not to mention the problems of browsers and web programs. I have noticed that with the recent switch to a more tablet based environment the websites have become a little odd in how they work between platforms.
Then you have the reality that certain hospital and hospital and insurance systems operate on a variety of specialized programs that are not universal. You are not dealing with trying to integrate 2 or 3 OS. You are trying to port data to perhaps hundreds of different applications for different businesses. You are just not going to have a good opening when you go live. The thing they need to work on is quickly addressing the pile of problems that have come up, and it seems they may not have been prepared for that event. If they were not actually prepared it is not just a matter of hiring people, but also of training them on the programs used, and also training them on how to work in those specific offices. It could be a few months before they have the people there to do the job if they understaffed to try and come in below budget.
But they'll eventually get the kinks worked out, at a cost an order of magnitude what it would be if
a) Bill Gates had never been born, and
b) the various federal government agencies actually had an interoperable database system (decades ago the various military branches could not talk to each other on their radios, and there were similar snafus at the state and local civic agency level... that type of lack of oversight is probably what we are seeing in the digital age), and
c) one contractor had been given overall supervisory control to ensure that all the interrelated pieces actually interrelated.
Oh -- and to give credit where credit is due, if the Neandertal Republican governors had actually set up exchanges in their states then the load on the feds would have been much less, and perhaps nil.
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Well, as for B. they still do not have that which is probably another problem. They are getting to the point where that is starting but states operate on different systems. I am pretty sure the variety of different contractors they use for different systems is probably a huge part of their problem, but I am also pretty sure the government did not have the people available to build this system themselves. It would have been preferable, but they probably had to do the contractor thing. It may have helped to have the beginning load dispersed across a bunch of state systems, but then the states will end up writing their own systems and you would then have to eventually bring together data from 50 different states.
It is a huge undertaking that was not going to start well, and it also had a lot of people trying to destroy it's release. You have to recognize the reps were putting poison pills in everywhere they could to make this a disaster. Anyone who expected it to be good and operational within 6 months of it's launch were fooling themselves. Still, in order to implement it you have to start it, and that is what they did. If they waited for it to be perfect to implement a new system of any sort we would never have anything new.