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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?
Unless the US Government threatens to bankrupt them via liquidated damages its unlikely the healthcare system will ever work properly. A sentence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.
How do you fix a Rube Goldberg foundation under a building? You demolish it and start over.
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.
It's Accenture. They write contracts DESIGNED to make a profit if they fuck up.
I know the name change had reasons other than getting away from the bad reputation of Andersons, but it did have that side effect. If they have a front page for a week fuckup it won't kill them but I bet they'll change their name.
It'll be "good enough". Accenture built the California site, which works fine, and the insurers really want it to work, so they'll accept less than perfect.
Of course, the summary is designed to make everyone say "THERE'S NO CHANCE!!" It's kind of insulting in its blatant demagogy, but I've come to expect that here.
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
Oh fuuu....ccccckkk! They screwed up the NHS database in the UK and now they moved on to the US. Don't any deep pocketed government read the news? Why hire totally incompetent assholes? I wonder if they are the same pricks who wrote that divide-by-zero code which crashed a French space rocket.
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.
s/Or/And/
They got the plan straight from the Mendacity King, Mitt Romney. With help from the insurance industry, who wrote large swaths of it for their own benefit, before having the Heritage Foundation put it out.
But hey, maybe they want this whole idea to fail, and Obama is really playing 11-dimensional chess as he sets everything up for a takeover with FEMA camps and Kenyan Anti-Colonialist Muslim Communist Homosexual Death squads!
Me, if I'd been in charge of business, I'd have gone straight to single-payer and put all of the disemployed Insurance paper-pushers into something more productive like counting grains of sand.
Remember when Bush 43 awarded no-bid contracts to Haliburton and other companies in the LOGCAP program to provide services, supplies, and logistics to troops in iraq and afghanistan in the mid-2000's? There was a lot of outrage by the media and the left about it. Now, Obama awards no-bid contracts to companies to fix healthcare.gov and there isn't a single peep of outrage.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Accenture, from the multinational corporation formerly known as Arthur Andersen, changed their name after the Enron scandal, formerly residents of tax haven Bermuda, now residents of tax haven Ireland http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2013/11/06/if-ireland-is-not-a-tax-haven-what-is-it/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Enron_scandal
The government has a real chance of learning the lesson that pieces of paper containing the words 'A will do B or else C' for various combinations of A, B and C, are nowhere near as effective as an imaginary fairy with a wand when it comes to actually getting stuff done. If real fairies with real, working magic wands were an option, it would most likely work much better than the current approach, but alas all the fairies were driven out long ago by the forces of insistent scientists demanding that fairy magic has no place in a modern scientific world. 'Suit yourself,' said the Fairy Queen, 'we thought we were doing you a favour, seriously, it's better where we come from, magic works properly there, and we're only too happy to oblige!' So the Fairy Queen and all the magic fairies and their magic wands disappeared into the sunset, and the US government was left with only paper, letters and no magic spell power besides 'contractual terms' to allow the pieces of paper to have any useful effect.
John_Chalisque
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??
Two reasons:
1. People are (god help me, I feel a fedora sprouting from my head and hairs growing from my neck as I type this) sheep. Your average person would lose their goddamned shit if they didn't have someone telling them what to do and when to do it. This is the end result of an education system that teaches blind love of authority, followed by corporate structures that do the same with regard to their employees. Thinking is hard. Decisions are tough. Et cetera.
It's only partly because of education, but for the *most* part, it's the innate human instinct to "go with the flock", and yes, just like the sheep.
Idol worshiping is everywhere, from movie stars to athletes to religious figures to even people of the most untrustworthy occupation - politicians - flocks of sheep pay their homage to their idols.
Whatever their idol did, no matter how wrong it is, the sheep will find excuses to defend - even when it is utterly *un*defendable, they still try their best to defend.
Like the original contract for this website which went to a college buddy of the POTUS' wife, without open bidding.
If we are to criticize the award of that original contract to someone who has no clue in setting up a website, the sheep will be rubbed the wrong way and they will revolt. They will attack whoever dare to criticize their idols.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... tiny. Minute. About the same as for any monster project, e.g. here in Vienna the project that was retrofit the entire IT landscape, software and hardware, in one giant project. Awarded to IBM. Who majestically botched it.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Accenture (and the like) image in IT departments (technical side) is often illustrated thanks to some jokes, like the famous Why did the chicken cross the road?. While the IT department usually delivers practical and tangible services, these "consulting companies" made their way up to the management. The management, IT illiterate, is always keen on overpaying some comforting but useless lengthy overpriced reports from such a consulting company, stacked later on at the bottom of a cabinet, having a sticky note inserted on page 3/1000, page where the reader gave-up reading. Useless reports aimed at influencing high level decisions at the management level, that may not have a direct or lethal impact on IT productivity. Besides the heavy cost embedded in the management budget, usually no one really cares. The problem arises when a big entity, IT illiterate, does not have a solid IT structure yet, and assigns full responsibility to such a "consulting company" to manage a new IT service, from A to Z.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It's very easy:
From Accenture's managerial point of view, it will be a huge success.
From the government's point of view, it will be a massive failure.
And the real losers are the american citizens.
Let the one who has never missed a deadline throw the first stone...
Large healthcare IT ventures are notoriously hard. Yes, screwups were made, but lets not stamp everyone that worked on this project into the ground. It's good to level criticism at those involved to show them we are not pleased at what was delivered, but they are humans, and despite what you believe there are plenty of hard working, smart people working at these boring and incredibly hard government projects.
It's very hard to automate a broken idea.
Even reasonable tests for bugs would take longer than they have, modeling, prediction, fixing architecture, design and implementation - no chance at all. I would estimate this will take at the very least 2 years and possibly as long as 5. Even if it takes 5 years, there is a real possibility it will have completely failed at the end.
I predict that Accenture will fail to deliver, but will make off with the money anyways, possibly after having gotten significantly more.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you require insurance companies to sell across state lines you can turn it into an interstate commerce issue.
Wasn't it the short deadline that caused the disaster?
while
I know these primadonas and I can bet my fortune that these fuckheads will fail miserably.
You can't REQUIRE them to do that. You can ALLOW them to do that.
Insurance companies are regulated at the State level....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Me, if I'd been in charge of business, I'd have gone straight to single-payer and put all of the disemployed Insurance paper-pushers into something more productive like counting grains of sand.
Yes, I agree. And smarter people than me agree. Insurance companies take 15 cents out of your health care premium dollar. A lot of that goes to paper-pushers. Your doctor takes another 15 cents to manage the insurance paperwork. In Canada, they don't have that 30 cents cost. That 30 cents could cover all our out-of-pocket costs.
Obama ran a $1 billion campaign. A lot of that came from the health care industry. That's the drug manufacturers, hospitals, doctors' associations.
Bill Moyers asked, did Obama get outsmarted, or is he one of them? Matt Tabi (sp?) would say he's one of them.
So one theory is that politicians are bought off by the health care industry.
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.
GOP Quit? Are you kidding? I think they wrote the contract. Who else would use phrases such as 'the entire healthcare reform program is jeopardized.' and 'the entire health insurance industry at risk.' I wonder if somewhere in the document it states 'and people, young and old, will die' as that seems to be the refrain from anyone in the GOP when it comes to the ACA.
Completing the work is likely to be a tall order and I'm sure there will be more rough spots but I hardly think it means the end of the health care industry, health insurance industry or civilization as we know it.
Shoot, the insurance industry owns too much of our government for anything truly bad to happen to them. More likely any rough spots will be used to justify some response that is profitable for the health insurance industry.
"What are their odds of success?" We're talking about Accenture, so it's an easy question to answer: Zero. Worst company I ever worked for by far. In six months, people are going to miss CGI.
I still call them Anderson Consulting, because they don't deserve to get away from the stench of the Enron disaster.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
* Accenture will realize the problem is much worse than they first realized, or that they chose to admit (by choice.)
* The first two months they will have actually done very little. Perhaps created a plethora of new documentation.
* Accenture will have extended the contract several more times, the new total amount will be near 250 million dollars.
* Additional exceptions to the law will help to extend the contract so that changes can be implemented, and deadlines will simply keep moving.
* The whole system will operate in pretty much the same way it does today.
Accenture will not be at fault, however. They were just trying to fix the problem. And there just was not enough time and money. Then begins another year. Start the whole process again...
Eventually,this will all go down as a miserable failure. But don't underestimate the amount of dollars that can be wasted along the way.
Then begins phase 2, under Hillary Clinton most likely. Give it another try, why not?
I know of at least one project bunged up by Accenture. That why they're called Accidenture: http://accidenture.com/
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.
No, there isn't. Legality is a non-issue in this situation and in general, due to the Supreme Court's ruling, complexity, several states are as big as nations running their own healthcare systems, necessity...maybe, because a national program is more necessary than a state program, but not really, see complexity again, and implementation goes back to complexity issues. You've really just used a bunch of words together that don't actually serve much differentiation among them.
But none of that matters a difference as to the nature of the plan though, which is where you haven't made an effective distinction between what Romney insisted was a model for the nation (before he was against it) and what was implemented in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
"Obamacare" is most certainly not "Romneycare".
And yet you absolutely failed to articulate how. Asserting it doesn't articulate it.
(* The Federal government has absolutely no authority to be enacting health care nonsense.
I'd like to think that the Federal government has no authority to enact any nonsense, health care or otherwise.
But that doesn't mean that the Federal government has no authority to enact actual and meaningful laws relating to healthcare. Otherwise we'd have to get rid of institutions like the Centers for Disease Control.
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.)
And this is boring and tedious argumentation. I don't give a shit about your originalist interpretations of the Constitution, I prefer arguments based on sound policy, not worthless appeals to long-dead authority who can't be consulted let alone debated with about how wrong they were.
Were I to consider it necessary, I'd support a Constitutional Amendment requiring the Federal implementation of an improved system, but I don't, what I do consider necessary is a Constitutional Amendment requiring a regular reconsideration of the parameters and scope of the Constitution which includes de novo discussion of matters. It'd be much more effective.
Some states demonstrate this even more effectively, like Alabama and Texas. Their state constitutions are not worth the paper they're printed on, but are instead effective garbage.
I'm sure they'll bring the same level of skill and professionalism to this task as they do all their other contracts!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines is what the industry has been salivating for and the Republicans have been working hard to pass. Tha same thing happened with the banking industry with credit cards. That is why all credit card companies are based in South Dakota. When the government allowed all banks to operate across state lines, the race to the bottom began and South Dakota won. Whichever state has the loosest regulatory structure is the one that will be chosen and every consumer pays the price.
follows the "Hollywood Blockbuster" management style. You know where the guys in the trenches try to tell the higher ups what's going wrong and are ignored.(And if they were listened too there would be no problems and the movie would be over in the first 15 minutes.) Only through heroic efforts by the grunts do things work out and only in the last 15 minutes of the film, err I mean the last 10% of development time. I would bitch about that but then I'm reminded I work for a company that isn't part of the government and they do the same shit, they think it's a peachy idea.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't give a shit about your originalist interpretations of the Constitution, I prefer arguments based on sound policy, not worthless appeals to long-dead authority who can't be consulted let alone debated with about how wrong they were.
What's the point of law, if it can be safely ignored whenever "sound policy" arguments are trotted out? A genuine "sound policy" argument would have strong respect for existing law, including the "long-dead" Constitution.
Accenture has two months to fix HealthCare.gov
Two months? For large, non-trivial projects, two months is nothing. A month will go by just trying to learn what the fuck is going on under the hood, and a few more weeks just to get everybody to get ready for the first milestone out of many that need completion.
If this shit can be fixed in two months, theneither the previous contractor was close to finishing (and thus it made no sense to add more uncertainty and risk by changing contractors), or this shit is/was trivial to begin with.
The other possibilities are that the two-month deadline is completely arbitrary, or indeed, the zombieapocalypse is upon us (better start packing your cans of beans, ammo boys and horned helmet biker paraphernalia boys!!).
The MAIN GOAL of these big companies is to suck money. The "collateral goal" is to provide the "official offered solution". Having presence in several countries, they simply give foreign "gifts" when contracts are approved.
The article says this, like it's a bad thing.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It would only be worse if it was Infosys. Accenture people are merely incompetent, while Infosys people are both incompetent and lazy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If you know competent Accenture employees, persuade them to quit.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yup. Two months is insane for such a project.
Smacks of decrees from non-technical executives who know nothing about the technology they are "leading".
Isn't this the reason the original project was such a mess? Bizarrebitrary deadlines imposed from the top with no recognition of engineering reality?
At least it will be a quick march to the death (only two months) not a protracted one.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Given that Accenture is a consultancy (no confidence means no developers), and that no one would develop a software solution that could encompass all the afore mentioned requirements, I would say there's absolutlely no chance at all for success, because the system is designed to fail. This has a name: corruption, as simple as that. This might mean a sad, very sad ending for Obamacare. Incompetence at the highest level, is no incompetence. Welcome to the United banana States of America ! So sad.
There's a difference between the way things SHOULD be and the way they are in the real world. Nobody in a position of power cares what the constitution says, therefore it is ignored. And its pretty much been this way since the country was founded.
I don't see that as flamebait. The single embarrassing dichotomy in the USA is in the first question - what services do you want to buy; institutionalised global death-at-whim, or healing people who are sick without punishing them brutally by ruining them financially for the rest of their lives?
That's a legitimate question.
When did America become "The Brutal Country"?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Nobody in a position of power cares what the constitution says, therefore it is ignored. And its pretty much been this way since the country was founded.
That's not true in practice. Sure, they don't care what the Constitution says, but they do end up caring about the constraints that it puts on their actions and power. They can't ignore that.
Okay, so no, you don't have any recent links from even a nominally unbiased source to show what we can actually expect.
Good points.
How likely do you think that the ACA will be overturned any time in the next two decades now that it's gone into practice?
I put the odds under 1% personally.
If you wanted to bet money, I'd want 100:1 odds to be on the ACA being overturned now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So Anderson Consulting was not connected with Anderson Consulting? Or the parent company that put up the money?
What motivates people to try to slip such lies through? Once you've convinced the naive people of such lies Hognoxious what's the next manipulative step? What is it you want to turn these kids into and what do you want to do with them?