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Accenture Faces Mid-March Healthcare.gov Deadline Or 'Disaster'
PapayaSF writes "TheHill.com reports that Accenture has two months to fix HealthCare.gov by building a 'financial management platform that tracks eligibility and enrollment transactions, accounts for subsidy payments to insurance plans, "provides stable and predictable financial accounting and outlook for the entire program," and that integrates with existing CMS and IRS systems.' The procurement document, posted on a federal website, states that if this is not completed in time, there will be 'financial harm to the government' and 'the entire healthcare reform program is jeopardized.' Risk mitigation (which pays insurers who enroll a higher-than-expected number of sick patients) must be accurately forecast, or it might put 'the entire health insurance industry at risk.' Accenture will also have to fix the enrollment transmissions, which have been sending inaccurate and garbled data to insurance companies. Because the back-end cannot currently handle the federal subsidies, insurers will be paid estimated amounts as a stopgap measure. The document also said that officials realized in December that there was no time for a 'full and open competition process' before awarding Accenture the $91 million contract. What are their odds of success?"
Why is government software like this thing not open source? What is the motivation for it being closed source?
Two months is barely enough to understand the problem and to start reading top level documents. Not even looking at the code. Most of those tasks are system-level, and it will be essential to understand what data formats each of those entities wants - before some poor code monkey is given signed requirements to generate that data.
No chance at success. Just like the rest of ObamaCare, a misconceived piece of legislation that managed to take a market plagued by serial distortions of preferential tax treatment for third-party insurance and actually make them worse by larding on an individual mandate and even larger subsidies to insurance companies.
And the worst is yet to come, when some 80 million additional employer-sponsored policies are cancelled.
The failure of the website is just the cherry on top of incompetent conception, planning and execution all along the line. It can take Apple or Microsoft 6 months to fix the bugs in a major release to an X.1 release, and Accenture is supposed to take someone else's far-more-dysfunctional code-base and make it work in 8 weeks?
Not going to happen, and just another example of the serial dishonesty and manifest incompetence of the Obama Administration.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Especially for Accenture, a company with a fairly consistent record for failure in large IT projects, especially for government IT projects.
But at that, the chances of something that can be spun as "successful" are greater for Accenture than for Deloitte. Not by much.... but some.
I think the headline writers are a bit confused on who exactly is facing the disaster here, and it's certainly not Accenture.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
There is no longer any point to these discussions of American inability to accomplish anything useful.
1. Fifteen years ago, Americans cheered as their neighbors were fired en masse while their retirement accounts were savaged by the dot com crash and corporations helped themselves to armloads of taxpayer cash.
2. Eight years later, Americans cheered as their still unemployed neighbors were thrown from their homes by bald-faced institutional fraud while corporations helped themselves to armloads of taxpayer cash.
3. Now, Americans cheer as their government passes, then ratifies a plainly unconstitutional monstrosity which deprives millions of families of affordable health care while corporations help themselves to armloads of taxpayer cash.
Americans once valued education and competence. Americans followed people they respect. American leaders took care of the people they led.
But the word "American" no longer has any meaning to the people who live in this country. The average person is embarrassed to claim the name "American." Those who do are reviled, jeered and looked on with suspicion.
We have completely forsaken our integrity, our parents, our country and everything it ever stood for. Flying the flag over the narcissistic wreck this country has become is nothing short of blasphemous.
The men who died at Appomattox, and Normandy, and Lexington and the Somme died for nothing. We have abandoned our neighbors to the winds and freed our government to claim any power it wishes and to use it however destructively it wishes without even the slightest electoral consequence. America no longer has a soul.
And that is why all the king's horses and all the king's men can't build a web site.
How is it that we landed men on the moon in ten years, but we can't write some web applications in six years? Or consider that the US involvement in the second world war was just four years, enough time for us to develop two different kinds of nuclear weapons, as well as build vast numbers of ships and airplanes that actually worked.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Yep. I see no mention anywhere of "penalties" or "personal liability".
I bet those people who are busy pocketing money wouldn't be so eager to sign government contracts if they put words like those in them.
No sig today...
Accenture worked on the Australian Taxation Offices "Change Program", which cost billions and was a debacle. From the moment that they got the contract it was all about trying to progressively descope so that they had to deliver less and less. They delivered a fraction of what they said they would and many years late.
But then they have a habit of employing smart young non-techies and then putting them in technical positions, and work practices that border on a cult.
Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.
They got the plan straight from the Mendacity King, Mitt Romney.
People love to bring this up, but protip:
There is a massive difference in legality*, complexity, necessity, and implementation in running a program in a state, vs. running it at the Federal level.
"Obamacare" is most certainly not "Romneycare".
(* The Federal government has absolutely no authority to be enacting health care nonsense. In effect, this legislation is illegal. In reality, the Constitution is long dead in all but in the form of something to trot out and thump one's chest about, so it's game on, of course. I'm not calling out either party here, because you'd pretty much have to go back to John Motherfucking Adams if you want the first real boot to the Constitution's head, or George Kills-For-Fun Washington if you want to see where the destruction of the supreme law of the land actually began.)
So, it's a $91 million dollar contract on a two month timeline.
Let's say there is a profit margin in there, of 50%, so cost is 45.5 million
Let's say it's really important, and everybody works 60 days.
That is over 750,000 per day.
If we average $4,000 (total guess) per day per project team member, we have 190 people on the team.
Who the hell can organise 190 people on a two month project.
How has this been estimated?
Can anyone else make the numbers work??
Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.
Because they are highly respected in management circles. You get the tech view on them and I have to agree that I would never, ever, ever hire them unless you put a gun to my head or something equivalent. But management thinks differently. From what I've grasped, they deliver excellent work, as far as management is concerned - that means regular status updates in easy-to-digest powerpoint slides, solid contract work, and instantly available expertise (if you tell them you need an expert on your big-ass storage system, tomorrow, they'll fly someone in and send you a bill).
All of these and many similar things are like miracles to a beleaguered manager who needs to save his neck from the management layer above him who's asking for his head in order to save their own.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
True, although the expert will often as not turn out not to be, and they will make decisions that will haunt you for years.
Not that the competition is any better.
Exactly. Obama will just decree that they can have more time, breaking his own laws once again
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Good old Accenture. I remember having to work with those clowns on the London Stock Exchange website. Our small company had been running it since day 1 but due to a deal between Accenture, Microsoft and HP we were slowly being pushed out of our position. They decided to let the Accenture guys handle running the website which led to a few funny events, the best of which were:
1. Our team noticing the website had stopped serving pages for price information. We rang their team who were supposedly monitoring it 24/7 and told them. They asked what they should do...uh, so I said "Just IISReset the server, it should come back up". Their highly paid tech then asked me..."how do I IISReset it?"...oh god, no!
2. Accenture wanted to push a change out to part of the site. They let their best and brightest do the work. Instead of copying over the files he somehow managed to delete the 15 minute delayed price site. They then tried to blame that on us, but when I mentioned in the emergency meeting that we no longer logged on to perform maintenance and we could simple check the security log to see who did it they clammed up.
3. The same idiot who deleted prices went and deleted the entire website by mistake. We laughed, a lot.
What's that old line..."Accenture, taking the freshest recruits straight from college and putting them in charge of your billion dollar enterprises." :D
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.