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White House Reportedly Dismissing Key Healthcare.gov Contractor
Nerval's Lobster writes "Months after a problem-riddled rollout of the Healthcare.gov Website, the White House is dismissing a key contractor, CGI Federal, that built much of the portal, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper suggested the federal government is on the verge of signing a new contract with a replacement, Accenture, which has some experience in building online health-insurance portals on the state level. 'We are in discussions with potential clients all the time but it is not appropriate to discuss with the media contracts we may or may not be discussing,' an Accenture spokesperson is quoted as saying. Unnamed sources 'familiar with the matter' informed the Post of CGI Federal's dismissal, and suggested that it has much to do with continuing anger over the botched introduction of Healthcare.gov, as well as the pace of continuing repairs to the Website. As their contract is due to expire anyway at the end of February, government officials reportedly decided that it was the perfect time to pull the plug with a minimum of legal ramifications."
Clearly, you've not dealt with companies who have built their world around a specific technology before.
Those companies tend to be like hammer-makers -- they view everything as a problem to be solved with a hammer.
We once had a manger (well, briefly, he was someone's drinking buddy) who was a huge RDB ER-diagram nut.
Now, our system wasn't an RDB, and was never going to be. In fact, it was nothing at all like an RDB. But, he insisted on making reams of meaningless ER-diagrams which had nothing at all to do with the system.
We repeatedly told him his diagrams had nothing to do with our system, and that there was no point in creating ER-diagrams that didn't apply, and that we were not going to use them because they were meaningless. He continued to insist that the only workable way to describe what we were doing was with an ER-diagram, and continued to produce even more. Of course, since the ER-diagrams were meaningless, they neither described the system as it existed, nor as it was supposed to be.
Eventually, his pretty little models were demonstrated to be pure fantasy, completely unrelated to the software at hand, and mostly just something he did to make it look like he was productive. And, to top it off, they were done in software he owned a copy of, but the company didn't -- which means nobody but him could do anything with them besides look at them and wonder what they were for.
Someone finally understood what the developers had been saying for a while, and realized that not only was this guy not helping us get anything done, he was giving the ER diagrams to the client, who were then asking "what is this, and how does it relate to what we have". Eventually management realized what was happening, and got rid of him.
It really isn't uncommon for someone to come in and more or less say "I consider myself an expert in X, and you are using Y, therefore in my professional opinion you need to start using X".
It has nothing at all to do with the specific needs, or even the problem at hand. But it's what they know, and what they think everyone should be using.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hello. I am the guy who designed AND implemented 4 state healthcare solutions.
Back when I worked for IBM I remember being the odd man out in a room full of Accenture people for a 80 million dollar insurance project (company rhymes with Farrmers .. no it was Farmers Insurance). So IBM is terrible and currently in a race to the bottom in terms of dollars spent on resources (My current contract has me and a few Indians plus a hundred worthless Chinese coding for IBM) BUT Accenture was a real eye opener.
Imagine a world in which you are given a team of 8 people. 1 of them was a frat boy. 1 of them was a sorority girl and the other 6 of them just graduated from wherever and are learning on your dime. I have never, in my life of consulting which is LONG witness a more worthless fucking organization than Accenture. It exists purely to employ the most worthless and without talent amongst us and is perpetuated by the same.
I hate IBM, I would kill your mother and fuck her rancid corpse to rid the earth of Accenture.