Slashdot Mirror
How Much Is Oracle To Blame For Healthcare IT Woes?
Nerval's Lobster writes "The state of Oregon blames Oracle for the failures of its online health exchange. The health-insurance site still doesn't fully work as intended, with many customers forced to download and fill out paper applications rather than sign up online; Oracle has reportedly informed the state that it will sort out the bulk of technical issues by December 16, a day after those paper applications are due. 'It is the most maddening and frustrating position to be in, absolutely,' Liz Baxter, chairwoman of the board for the online exchange, told NPR. 'We have spent a lot of money to get something done—to get it done well—to serve the people in our state, and it is maddening that we can't seem to get over this last hump.' Oregon state officials insist that, despite payments of $43 million, Oracle missed multiple deadlines in the months leading up to the health exchange's bungled launch." (Read more, below.)
"This isn't the first time Oracle's name has circulated in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act's digital drama. In November, USA Today published a piece suggesting that 'communication breakdowns' with Oracle Identity Manager had led to 'bottlenecks' in the registration process for Healthcare.gov, the federal online health exchange, which in turn prevented some users from signing up for healthcare. But a single contractor doesn't lie at the root of the federal Healthcare.gov's spectacular debacle: despite months of preparations, large sections of the site remained unfinished on launch day, and the completed parts crashed as soon as users began entering the site. According to multiple sources, the Medicare agency tasked with overseeing the project failed to adequately test, much less integrate, the site's complex elements ahead of launch day. Even if it didn't hold that much responsibility for the federal Website's issues, though, Oracle could find itself the target of much more blame in the Oregon case, where it was reportedly the sole contractor and overseer."
This after Oracle came out explaining how Open Source is not only dangerous but a cancer to development. I'm so glad Oracle has shown with out a shadow of a doubt that Open Source software leads to broken systems, I would hate to not know this, good work Oracle, from now on I'll always pick the closed source guys ...
Oracle services may at times make a hash of things.
But we are too quick to blame Oracle and the developer of healthcare.gov for problems that come down to what is simply, a bad and incomplete spec that is impossible to build a good system against.
Indeed the "re-launch" of Healthcare.gov recently only works so much better because they scrapped the requirement that an application had to be completed in order for you to see prices (so you would not see the real price). The application process still is deeply flawed; but you can at least see raw static data now...
So don't place too much blame on Oracle for not succeeding at a Herculean task.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Plenty of the latter will help you sign the cheques for endless customization work orders until the money is gone. They have no actual interest in getting your product to market.
Of course, bad project/program management is the actual fault here but at some point an ethical consultant will say 'Look, this will kick the can down the road to infinity+10 minutes.'
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Couldn't happen to a nicer company. Hope your league of lawyers works out for you Oracle! Captcha for this post: Profited.
In any other context "can't deliver on time" means "you're fired and we're suing for breach of contract." In the software solutions market it means "we're going to ride your sunk cost fallacy into the ground, please send us more money."
It's not news or a secret that Oracle swindle from big companies and government agencies, almost always an exact amount of 40 million USD and then fucks them up big fucking time.
Of course in each of these agencies and companies, there was an "IT" guy who convinced the management that Oracle was the way to go ... of course for at least 2 million USD off the 40...
Now, it's their mistake to constantly go back to the rapist... and then be sad about the fact that they got raped. Whatever happened to Postgres and a tonne of other awesome solutions that are honest and do a great job!
Welcome to Oracle! This is not news. In fact, welcome to Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Dell. Am I forgetting anyone?
Having only recently started to use Oracle, and based on those experiences, I'm pretty sure that 90% of all cancer cases in the U.S. can be blamed on Oracle.
When the bus is barreling towards you, throw them under it first!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I am talking about both because both face the same issues. They are trying to build a website against a spec that was never complete until very late, and even now had fundamental problems in implementation because of what they are trying to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My team has been talking about healthcare.gov and all the related woes for a while. Pretty much we're all in agreement that we should thank the baby jeebus every day it's not our project haha. Seriously though, for something this complex, if the team grows to over about 15 people it's doomed. And that's just YOUR side, I have a lot of experience interfacing to insurance providers' systems. Half the time the provider you're trying to connect to is broken and doesn't work per their API docs at a basic level let alone have proper capacity let alone have any sense of normal connectivity. I can't even imagine trying to talk to something as huge as the IRS. I bet it's 6 months before you can get a simple spelling fix on an API method pushed out to production.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Years ago, Oracle sub-contracted my former company to implement a minor portion of a very large ERP rollout. During the rollout there were huge technical glitches, and the client wasn't happy. It didn't help that my company's small team was telling the much larger Oracle team how to solve their technical problems. In the end, the client put our company in charge of the rollout, and it got done. What we found in other projects with Oracle (we were a Oracle partner) was that our personnel had much deeper expertise with Oracle than members of their own company.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Central Planning at its best. What we would consider worse, they consider better.
I doubt they did sufficient testing. The issues they have now, should have come up in testing. Yeah, sometimes unforeseen things happen in production that did not show up in testing, but this goes ways beyond that. The Federal version of this system was, simply put, never tested from end to end. I suspect that is what happened here.
Okay, so that sounded like a defense of Oracle. Well, it ain't. Blame should be placed where it belongs; on the government hacks that put this tragic waste of tax-dollar money into service.
And then I have to ask; why the f*ck are they not using open source?
Everything seems to swing. But one thing is certain, always follow the money.
This whole 'contracting' affair on both the public and private sector does not produce the highest quality products. Why should it? None of the incentives are there.
The contracting company doesn't want to build something that works without flaws for a minimal profit. They want to have continuing profits. This is not unique to big corporations. Just try dealing with any contractor or mechanic. Sure if you *know* them, you can deal with them honestly somewhat. Or if you pay them enough... and they can cost a lot, you can get an honest deal.
At best, you hope they do a good job and that means you build a good relationship, and that means more business in the future. But of course, when this comes to government contracts, what that natural process means is that it gets called corruption.
On the other hand, you can have the builder operate it. There's some incentive there for them to do a good job as they get a cut of continuing operations. I think there is some hope that the 'cloud' will actually provide for better overall software. Although of course this results in vendor lockin and could potentially cause all kinds of other business problems.
Or you could build it in house. Then of course you run the risk of an overstaffed bureaucracy and unionized government workers.
There's no real easy solution. But I do think the dominant view has swayed too far towards contracting.
They're unbreakable, after all.
#DeleteChrome
No matter what you do, you will find yourself in this same position with Oracle.
I've had the misfortune of using their collaboration platform, which despite their claims to the contrary, was essentially a beta product that even they didn't know how to set up and configure.
My experience with Oracle is they consistently over-promise, under-deliver, and over-charge.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think we as a society are wrestling with this question: If an entity with obvious motivations to make money off of you disingenuously provides services or goods that do not meet the original expectations or are vastly inappropriate, whose fault is it?
Examples:
You go to buy a car and the salesman tricks you into buying the "rust proofing" or some other nonsense addon that really doesn't add any value.
You go to buy a used car and the salesman sells you a car that he knows is a POS, that might be lucky to make it another 10000 miles.
You go to bestbuy and buy a $50 6' HDMI cable.
You go online and buy $500 speaker wire because the website said the electrons flow better
You take your car to the shop and the mechanic tells you it will cost $1000 to "calibrate your zener filter".
You ask your Cisco rep for advice on gear for your new expansion office, he sells you $50,000 of enterprise equipment for an office of 10.
Your PC is slow and you click on and pay for the "Speed up your PC by clicking on this button" scam.
You pay GeekSquad to do anything.
You pay for the extended warranty that doesn't actually cover anything extra and contains language that prevents you from making a claim in 99% of cases.
Comcast tells you that you have to get the 50 Mbps service or else you wont have enough bandwidth to facebook with your friends, they actually provide 50Mbps for a split second then you get maybe 10% of your advertised capacity.
I don't think any of the above examples are legally fraud. And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware. The exception I can think of is signing a contract with a SLA or something, which is really rare on the consumer level and it seems really rare for the government to require.
I was wondering how long it would take for people to try to shift the blame from the incompetent government to "evil corporations."
Liberty in your lifetime
on the project from the start. LMBO
The full US healthcare system is a mess just from rules / billing / pricing stand point.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html
Government IT projects tend to due poorly because the government regulations that project specifications get built on tend to lead to logical contradictions, and we all know how well programming works for contradictions.
In the UK, there are price comparison website who've been doing this for ages. With no pre-sign-up.
If the US gov asks nicely, maybe they can provide them with a readily designed platform...?
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
Fed and States, EVER use SLAs?
Oracle is to blame for *everything*. I also blame them for global warming, rising unemployment, and the fact that I was 2 minutes late to work today because of traffic. Oracle sucks!
Seem to be showing up everywhere these days.
It is one thing to say that the spec is incomplete, but when the spec is bad there is not much a developer can do. If you are told to make the wrong thing, well, either you make the wrong thing or someone else will be paid to do so. There is only so much a developer can do in that situation.
Palm trees and 8
It IS Oracle's responsibility to create the spec. Oregon just supplied a want list - Oracle were the ones who put it into spec. The IT consulting firm is responsible for creating the spec from the customer's requirements. This is shear incompetence on Oracle's part and the bureaucrat who didn't TELL Oracle to get their act together or they are going to eat it.
No excuses.
The other thing is, Oracle had all this work done in India and by Indian H1-Bs. In other words, Oregon could have saved tens of millions by cutting out the middle man and just hired an Indian firm directly - not politically prudent - but the truth. But if we let the American people know that big US IT firms are just middlemen for offshoring work, then things will change.
The only thing American about Oracle is the blustery, narcissistic CEO.
"The Software Industry failed to deliver healthcare.gov. As a result, millions of people are being hurt. We did that, folks. It was our industry, our failure." - Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/12/Healthcare-gov.html
when you're busy trying to figure out which Hawaiian island to buy?
Should change their name to Treacle.
Has there ever been an Oracle implementation that was not a debacle. My personal experience is 2 years late and way over budget.
Others have lost their positions as a result of the Oracle selection.
This is a government job so no one but the tax payers are screwed. But at least the birth control is covered ;)
Before writing a single line, the customer must enact the entirety of what they want using only Punch & Judy marionettes.
Organizations seem to get the idea of using Oracle identity management when they're already using Peoplesoft HR. The executives on the administrative/HR side see Peoplesoft/HR as the hammer you should use to do everything, and they often have more clout than the executives on the technology side who see would rather deploy anything else. Nevermind the users who have to put up with frequent login time-outs, account lockouts, and frequent browser restarts. What the users are supposed to be doing, their work is not as important as the goal of "doing everything in one system" which is Oracle/Peoplesoft because that's where employment records are kept.
The only thing different is scale. Except not even that; if you hadn't read the government website is addressing scale by punting. They put you in an email queue and tell you when you can come back to the site... really. So there's no indication Healthcare.gov is built to manage scale beyond any of the state run sites.
Other than that the websites have to work against the same backend systems, which are all in disarray and ill-defined.
Do you know how I know you have no experience in large-scale projects of know anything about websites for Obamacare?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I were in that bureaucrat's shoes now, Oracle would be PAYING Oregon now to keep the business. But it's too late - the World knows that Oracle is a bunch of fuck ups.
And if I were in that bureaucrat's shoes, I would have cut out the middlemen and just hired Indians - like Oracle did. I would have even created an internal department so that I could hire indians and H1-Bs and still keep it "America".
All morons. All of them.
It is their job to ensure that they get the specs they need to make it work.
Have you really never been on a failed project at a large company?
There are some specs where it simply is impossible to make work. Obamacare is such a spec, because the whole thing is too massive to work right and backend systems you need to integrate with do not exist yet!!!
You can't just pull a Tim Gunn and "make it work" in software if the thing you're trying to build is not feasible. You can make parts of it work, maybe, but what use is that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone familiar with OIM is already aware that it's garbage.
Look, Oracle, the only thing you do that's worth a damn is a decent RDBMS.
I can't count the number of times I had to either fix or listen to stories of the disasters Oracle made. I can't understand how these stories keep coming out about the large development firms and how their projects fail at a colossal level, yet people still run to them for their latest project. wtf is going on. it makes no sense.
for developing technology, at least their database, they do well. real-world implementation? you're better off going with a separate consulting firm that specializes in Oracle.
I want to share some thoughts about Cover Oregon, or the insurance exchange...
We were one of five states granted federal dollars ($48 million) to develop the technology. The agreement was we would then share what we had developed with other states, which is a reasonable approach. The warning that immediately went up is the fact the State of Oregon has a miserable track record when it comes to IT development. In this case, even though much of the work was contracted out to a company called Oracle, we have held true to our record of failure. We have been assured all of the problems can be fixed, and maybe that is true over time, but here we are with a non-functioning web site and 400 new government employees to do manual processing....
The federal government also gave Oregon nearly 250 million dollars to operate the exchange for two years. Another pot of federal money in play is the subsidies for people buying insurance in the exchange. It is on a graduated scale, but everyone up to 400% of the federal poverty level (for a family of four that is an income of $90,000) can get federal dollars to help pay their premiums. This will, to a degree, offset the premium increases, but only short term. In two years the operational funds as well as the subsidies are scheduled to go away.
Or you could, you know, explain to the client why it's the wrong thing to build, with relevant data to support your argument.
Your client is a politician. The politician has determined that showing the actual cost of a policy to a customer is a political liability, that they must only see their particular subsidized cost. The fact that this makes the system incredibly more complicated and thereby error prone is irrelevant. Politics demands this requirement and politics trumps actually providing people a service.
I know it's just a coincidince, but NPR has recently picked up Microsoft as a sponsor.
If you can blame Oracle, I'd recommend doing it.
They're a crappy company with a jerk CEO that likes to screw over anyone and everyone.
They're like a meaner version of Microsoft.
About the only good thing is they make fast sailboats when they're not cheating.
Instead of Oracle, they should have used PostgreSQL. At least the community would have resolved their issues (if any) faster.
How is it that Kentucky, California, and Arkansas have managed to build exchanges while Oregon has not. The fact is Oracle failed plain and simple. Even the federal government got the front end of their exchange fixed. You may disagree with the law, but on an unbiased performance evaluation the only conclusion that can be reaches is that Oracle FAILED.
I don't care if it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's still unconstitutional and completely invalid. NOBODY is obligated to comply and nobody is obligated to enforce it, and it's illegal to do so.
Anytime NPR runs a story about ACA, they protect Obama...assisting with fingerpointing away from Bill Nye, er...Sam the Eagle...er um I mean Katherine Sebelius, whose job it was to make this rollout successful. Which is of course was not and she should be fired for it. That's who is to blame...not Oracle.
Many more fingers, middle, will be pointing in the air Faster and with greater Fury in the run-up to Tax DAY 2014 and to July.
In 12 months who will be the lucky citizen to be arrested, arraigned and booked in prison for failure to pay OC dollars to Obama?
[snicker snicker]
Obama was right when he said today, "[paraphrased] 'ACA' will live as long as I am President." The count-down clock has already
started for January 20, 2017, the day the next President is sworn in and the date of ACA sudden death by executive order followed
by unprecedented Congressional action during a special joint session of both chambers on Inauguration Day.
I'm buying stock in Orville Redenbacher Popcorn!
TeeHee
Well there's the problem right there... they only paid 43 Million dollars. I think that's enough to buy one license of Oracle DB... for maybe a week or so...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
What you say about bad specs is true, but Oracle shouldn't have taken a gig with bad specs. When a company asks for bids to do a project, the bidders need to look at the spec and make sure that they address the risks and assumptions in the bidding process. If there are still questions after winning the bid, then you need to make sure those are addressed right away. Taking the money and then realizing months down the road that the spec was junk is just poor management.
Projects don't fail just because one side dropped the ball. There's pretty much always plenty of blame to go around. Writing poor specs, accepting poor specs, undocumented assumptions and poor communications all go into making a mess like this.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
There was a piece of news that 3 young people from Californiat (if I remember correctly) actually built a *WORKING* health-care site, similar to what Obamacare tried to do but failed, using nothing but FOSS !
I do not know what kind of license they put their website under, but the matter of the fact is, FOSS WORKS !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Interesting that nobody talks about methodology - must mean that it's YAAFU (Yet Another Agile eff Up)
and a quick web search later ... http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/enterprise-architecture/state-of-oregon-1864645.pdf
Yup. Suspicions confirmed. From the looks of it Oregon and Oracle put more effort into their pretty brochure than their specification.
People complaining about the spec not being good enough, or the goalposts moving, should do some basic research. Those are the very conditions which Agile is supposedly designed for. It was the Agile guys that discouraged Oregon from trying to do a whole lot of YAGNI BDUF, and when it blew up in their face, all of a sudden they don't want to talk about it.
We all know who gets the blame. The jerk who heads the Democrat party, the party that rammed this ill-conceived POS down voters throats in the spirit of pure crass political opportunism.
this sort of thing happens all the time. Customer hires Vendor...vendor does what customer asks...something goes wrong and customer gets pissed off and sues vendor. Say what you want about Oracle...or Larry Ellison for that matter...but the software works. Oracle has thousands of customers using their products and the stuff works.
Where it gets tricky with these big complex software systems is that many, many decisions have to be made with respect to how the software is configured before you can even begin using it. It can takes months, or longer, to get through all of this. Making the right decisions takes skill - both on the vendor side and on the customer side. It's a team effort. This is what customers often fail to remember, especially when things to south.
This is one of the reasons for so many meetings and documentation in these large software implementations. Partly, it's to protect the vendor in the event of a lawsuit.
Customer: "You screwed up this project"
Vendor: "Can you be more specific?"
Customer: "You advised us specifically not to use Option B for setting up our Chart of Accounts and now our whole Financials system is a mess."
Vendor: "Umm...actually we DID advise you to use Option B. Here are the meeting minutes from back in August. And this document contains both of our signatures approving the decision against Option B. Any further questions?"
Now I don't know all the specifics of this case but the fact that it's a State Government tends to make me believe that what I outlined above is what happened. I have worked with State Governments...trust me.
Most of the early load on the system was people trying to find out what was available. Instead of building fancy dynamic web pages loading database-generated content, that's really a job for a big static spreadsheet that can be cached (or one spreadsheet per state, or maybe a few per state if they have different plans in different regions.) Sure, the Republicans didn't help this by insisting that everybody's income had to be verified before they could sign up (which complicates the database linkages), but you don't need that for browsing and comparing plans.
And yes, not everybody has a spreadsheet; put OpenOffice or SomeGNUSpreadsheet or whatever out for people to download as well.
The actual sign-up load is under 100 million forms filled out. That's a day or so of processing on a medium-sized server if you implement it well, or several months of never finishing if you do it badly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
a competent management
There's your problem right there.
I couldn't make it as a real programmer in a competitive environment so I took a government job. This gravy gig lets me blow wads of dough on "Enterprise" software instead of doing any real architecture work. When $olutions don't work I get to blame the vendors. Life is good, I'm voting for a tax increase.