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Healthcare.gov Official Resigns, Website Still a Disaster
Nerval's Lobster writes "A government official who helped oversee the bug-riddled Healthcare.gov Website has resigned his post. Tony Trenkle, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees Healthcare.gov, will reportedly join the private sector after he departs on November 15. A spokesperson for the Medicare agency refused to say whether he had been forced out, telling reporters: 'Tony made a decision that he was going to move to the private sector and that is what our COO announced yesterday.' Because of his supervisory role, Trenkle is considered a significant player in the Website's development; The New York Times indicated that he was one of two federal officials who signed an internal memo suggesting that security protocols for the Website weren't in place as recently as late September, a few days before Healthcare.gov's launch.Following Trenkle's resignation, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted to the Senate Finance Committee that Healthcare.gov would require hundreds of fixes. 'We're not where we need to be,' she said. 'It's a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.' Sebelius added that she was ultimately accountable for what she termed the 'excruciatingly awful' rollout. Healthcare.gov has experienced massive problems since its Oct. 1 debut. In addition to repeated crashes and slow performance, the Website's software often prevents people from setting up accounts. President Obama has expressed intense frustration with the situation, but insists the Affordable Care Act (ACA) backing the Website remains strong. 'The essence of the law, the health insurance that's available to people is working just fine,' he told reporters in October. 'The problem has been that the website that's supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn't been working.' While the federal government won't release 'official' enrollment numbers until the end of November, it's clear that the Website's backers are losing the battle of public perception."
It seems like a giant project that was hurried, kind of like a Windows Vista. Isn't it getting gradually fixed?
I hear Microsoft is looking for a CEO..
Sebelius added that she was ultimately accountable for what she termed the 'excruciatingly awful' rollout.
Accountable how? Will she get a black mark on her annual review? She still has her job.
"will reportedly join the private sector"
Is that what unemployed people are called nowadays? No wonder reported unemployment is so low, contrary to all observable evidence. Certainly he won't be going into a "job" straight away - who in their right mind will hire him?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
My previous analysis
Simply:
One: Schedule Fail. Compounded by late award of the contracts to develop/influence:
Contracts Awarded Dec 2011
Two: massive requirements base to develop specification for development and implementation: The PPACA was 1800+ pages, and the associated regulations are 10,000+ pages, and are STILL changing. Can't develop without a spec and design, with big parts of requirements still changing.
Three: inadequate testing. The above-referenced link states that security testing BEGAN in August 2013, less than two months before rollout. There's no mention of load testing. .
UPDATE: There WAS load testing, Radio reports say it was tested with a 1000-user simultaneous load. EXPECTED was 60K simultaneous users. . .
However, the only CONCRETE numbers I've found say it crashed at several hundred simultaneous users. . .
Four: Integration issues. The Obamacare Exchange system combines data from numerous agencies and systems, and integrating between them is always a difficult task.
Five: Identity-management. This is in parallel to Integration, somehow all identities need to be federated into a single overarching system.
Twenty-three (now 25) months, even with a top-flight team, would simply not be enough to do this: this is a 5-7 year job. . .
I misread it as "healthcare.gov officialLY resigns". I was about to throw a party.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I've been on enough big-bang massive IT projects to know that this is no different from anything we've seen before.
- Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing (stuff that even "agile" can't account for): This is always a killer. Even an "agile" project can't have the framework ripped down and rebuilt at the last second...some decisions have to be permanent.
- Contractors who just want to collect money : Outsourcing is always more expensive and produces worse results than if you do it in house. The only thing you save is the cost of employees, but you pay more in the long run.
- Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends.
- Massive time pressure: I don't know why software development and IT are so different from engineering projects, but there is still the persistent myth that you can throw bodies at a late project to make it come in on time. You can't do this with a construction project of any reasonable size...there are still dependencies. Yet, there's always pressure to make arbitrary dates.
Seriously, replace "government healthcare insurance marketplace connecting people with thousands of insurers" with "SAP implementation", and you see the same problems.
I can see why they made this guy resign though -- someone has to be the scapegoat. At one of the companies I worked at, the much-loved founder of the company was thrown out by the board (it had grown into a public company) after a massive operations disaster that forced him to go out and publicly apologize. Some of it might have been willful blindness, but executives tend to say "I'm paying millions of dollars, just make this happen and don't bother me with details." Consulting companies love these kind of executives....
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But you tell me, if you are a cook who cooks great 3 min omlets and some smuck comes in
and gives you $1000 for a 1 minute omlete , what do you do ?
I tell you what I wouldn't do - give him a salmonella-inducing, raw fucking egg and call it an omelette. Because I'm not a moral-less piece of shit who values profits over the health and safety of my customers.
If the job can't be done under the criteria set forth, it can't be fucking done under the criteria set forth. You tell the fuckers that, and when they say, "well, we'll pay you extra to make the impossible happen," you politely decline, tip your hat, and be about your fucking business. Because guess what? When shit hits the fan and people start to suffer actual harm, who do you think is going to end up on that cross - the assholes that paid for it, or the idiot who tried to make a quick buck by willfully poisoning his customer base?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Here's the root of the problem and would explain why Obama, Sebelius, and other bureaucrats are sticking to their guns. They believe that they are smarter than the software engineers charged with building this monstrosity. From my own experience, I once got into a pissing contest with a senior VP over something I had developed for the department. He had no background in software or computers. None. Even though the guy had a Mac on his desk, he didn't understand the concept of windows and insisted on using a single one to view his files opening hundreds of turn-down triangles. Hundreds. But I digress. The guy only understood image, flash, and how things looked. His precious weekly schedules had to look pretty rather than be functional to the point where the secretaries were spending an entire day putting together a weekly schedule in QuarkXPress. So I built a database system (with the assistance of one of the secretaries) to generate these schedules. But the database engine we had available to us, while it could use fancy fonts, didn't understand variable character widths. So printing schedules using dingbats was a nightmare. During a presentation, some flunky asked if we could make some changes. The secretary said "Well I don't know. We're jumping through a lot of hoops to make it do what you're seeing now. I don't know if it's possible." The VP said "It's possible" without even asking me. I nearly quit that day. As a matter of interest, a few of my coworkers and I had a daily reading from The Dilbert Principle.
Point is that Obama and his minions don't understand that you can't set arbitrary deadlines for technology when they know nothing about it. It's the same as ignorant politicians setting lofty fuel economy standards without talking to automotive engineers to find out if the goal is realistic or even possible. The politicians believe their own hype in that they think they are smarter than the engineers. At the very least. One can also make the case that unrealistic goals aren't set out of ignorance but by design to suit their ideology. E.g. Set a pollution standard bar so high that it either isn't possible or that it's so expensive that nobody will bother and voila, the source of that pollution is gone taking all the benefits (jobs, consumer savings, useful product) with it. To the politician, the ends justify the means because in their mind, the citizenry is too stupid to understand it.
I have to say, this is one dumbass conspiracy theory I wish had a grain of truth to it.
Arguably, single payer would be simpler. Part of the complexity of this system is that it has to interface with a ton of insurers and their plans and be able to make comparison shopping possible.
If there was a single payer solution there wouldn't be any of that complexity. You would simply sign up and be covered. No choices, no options, a single plan.
You think the grand plan to get public buy in on government run single payer was to completely botch the roll out of government directed public healthcare? I'm not sure I follow the logic there.
Then you don't know how the left work.
First they create a problem, then they offer a 'solution', which was the policy they wanted in the first place. When have they ever offered a solution which consisted of rolling back the policy that caused the problem?
I'm not sure whether this was just a case of incompetence or intentionally botched, but it doesn't really matter. When people start screaming about how they can't get insurance because they can't get on the web site, and, in any case, the other people who have been able to get on the web site discovered their insurance would cost many times what they were previously paying, the 'solution' won't be to scrap the whole law, it will be to eliminate insurance any have the government run everything.
News reports are now saying he refused to sign off on the websites security.
When he wouldn't sign off on the website they went over his head to get a temporary security authorization from his boss, who, despite several warnings about holes throughout the system, didn't seem to have an issue signing off.
So as it turns out he may have been the only competent person there.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!