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."

Comments

Accenture?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fucking shit we're fucked.

Re:Accenture?

[Penguinisto]

No shit.

(...wait, let me guess - they'll want to move the whole damned thing to an IIS platform too, right?)

Re:Accenture?

[msobkow]

No kidding. Accenture is one of the worst money-grabbing providers out there. They bring in the "top tech talent" for the initial meetings, then bill you the same rates for a horde of junior incompetents, and you never see that senior talent again.

Re:Accenture?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with the IIS platform. Accenture is the issue. The vast majority of their PM team cannot find their dick with both hands.

Re:Accenture?

[gstoddart]

They bring in the "top tech talent" for the initial meetings, then bill you the same rates for a horde of junior incompetents, and you never see that senior talent again.

But, really, do you see this as different from any IT organization/software company you've dealt with?

The early enthusiasm and usefulness drops off pretty quick once the deal is signed and the sales guys get their commission checks.

And then you have the people wondering how the hell to implement a flying car and deliver on the unicorns which were promised by the sales guys.

I've certainly been on the receiving end of this from Oracle and a few others.

The problem is the people who chase the deals and carefully craft the responses to make it look like you've solved the problem. In a lot of cases, it's basically a shell game.

Re:Accenture?

[Penguinisto]

There is nothing wrong with the IIS platform. Accenture is the issue. The vast majority of their PM team cannot find their dick with both hands.

Never said it was wrong or right - but it's a common trick with large contractors to declare your existing platform obsolete, insecure, or underpowered, and (after you signed the contract) demand that you shove over to their preferred platform. Of course, they'll point to some esoteric half-hidden legalese thing in the contract that your non-tech legal department completely glossed over, and you never got to see.

This means they get extra money, more time to ETA, and they move you to whatever they're more comfortable with. It also has the danger of locking you in even tighter come the next contract renewal.

Re:Accenture?

[Billly Gates]

Could be worse.

If you think Accenture are incompetent vandals try to get anything done with IBM?

They charge so much for the tiniest things and then call me about jobs to admin these systems for $24,000 a year. No I am seriously not exaggerating that either as they wanted to pay me $12/hr for a millions of dollar contracts for such systems.

Great value these poor schmucks are getting for that price.

Re:Accenture?

[gstoddart]

What plausible reason could there be for moving a project to IIS? Does IIS have any advantages over free alternatives?

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.

Re:Accenture?

[gregor-e]

No, it's that the first few weeks of a project, the people they send are actually pretty sharp, enough to make you wonder if maybe you should float a resume over there, since they're billing outrageous gobs for these sharp people, and, hell, if you only got half of that hourly rate it'd still be a good jump up. Then, one by one, they sub out the sharp people with complete drones who require tons of hand-holding and who make n00b mistakes that inevitably slow down the rate of progress. Conveniently, this allows them to bill even more hours at the same top-talent rate you were envious of. Your company ends up paying $200/hr for $20/hr talent, and pays for more hours of this crappy talent to boot.

Anyone who contemplates renting talent from one of these big consultancy firms would do well to insist on naming specific individual developers in the contract, and add a performance penalty that multiplies the hourly billing rate by MIN(1.0, HOURS_QUOTED / HOURS_BILLED). That will prevent subbing in third-stringers billed at first-stringer rates and will provide diminishing returns for dilatory behavior, as well as incentivize them to think of everything that must be done before committing to a quote.

Re:Accenture?

[Kalriath]

You get a very rich platform that can grow big. After trying to learn Drupal it seems just like a big hack. Sure your Ruby on rails can do some cool things but can it do MVC, 3-tier SOA architecture, use Hibernate, linQ, or advanced data persistent frameworks for SQL databases that much Java Enterprise Edition or .NET?

Yes Ruby can do MVC. Yes it can do 3-tier. No, it can't use Hibernate but it has ActiveRecord which serves a similar purpose, and yes it can use data persistence frameworks. I think you're being a little hard on it, and I'm a dyed in the wool .NET Developer.

Re:Accenture?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Accenture does a fairly good job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Accenture does a fairly good job with contract development and support. This doesn't seem to be a bad call.

Re:Accenture does a fairly good job.

[Penguinisto]

I think the mod meant to give it a +1 YouGottaBeShittingMe, but forgot that Slashdot doesn't have that in the options.

Hmmm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the next question is will these guys do any better?

I've been involved in contracting with governments, and failures of projects are as often as not caused by the incompetence of the government people and their inability to understand what they want, but then blamed on the contractors who couldn't make the system do what it needed.

As is always the case, some times the devil is in the details, and just because the project failed, doesn't mean the people blamed for it actually were the ones who made the project fail.

Sometimes, it just means it's easier to blame the contractor, when in fact the client was completely inept.

Re:We all know what this means.....

[buswolley]

Taxes don't pay for Federal expenditures. That is a fallacy that is all too common.

This is a PR move.

[EMG at MU]

Who cares if they get dismissed a few weeks before their contract expired. Do they still get paid for the steaming pile of shit they created? Absolutely. Will they continue to get government contracts after this blows over? Absolutely.

This is a PR move.

Re:We all know what this means.....

[danlip]

Accenture already did the California implementation. And they've already had time to work out the problem. Hopefully they wrote that code so it could easily be reused for the federal site (since it is Accenture, that may be a slim hope).

Re:We all know what this means.....

[Grishnakh]

No, other peoples' children. This is Slashdot, remember, the home of single basement-dwelling neckbeards.

Yay, another foreign corporation

[CyberLeader]

When you're tired of screwing it up like amateurs, bring in Accenture so you can screw it up like professionals!

My firm has made a lot of money cleaning up Accenture's disasters. It's a living.

So while Accenture was originally based in Bermuda, they've since moved their corporate HQ to Ireland. Could we at least pick a vendor incorporated in the U.S.?

Re:Contracted Potential

[JDG1980]

In a company of 280,000+ employees, Accenture has the capacity and expertise to make the IT side of the government healthcare offerings work.

Pull the other one.

Most of Accenture's tech employees are Indians with inflated (or fraudulent) credentials.

Classmate != Buddy

[Tablizer]

Nobody's ever shown they are actually "buddies". Prominent Republicans have also gone to the same school at the time, and probably bumped into them at times. Does that make them "cronies" also? Let's not sling mud without solid evidence.