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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.
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
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, 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 !
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...
Why is everyone responding couching this in terms of a binary success/failure? I have worked in the health insurance industry for 20 years, through lots of business, state regulation and federal regulation clusterfuck deadlines, and the typical pattern is;
Note that a deadline is approaching in a year or so
Meet occasionally to marvel at how complex the change will be until 6 months before the deadline
Assign a team to do the work with 4 months to go
Have an "oh shit! ALL HANDS ON DECK!" come-to-Jesus meeting two months before the deadline where the CEO kicks some rhetorical ass
The team works like hell to implement what they can
Mid-level managers identify the *least* required functionality to avoid firing/contract penalties/lawsuit and/or prosecution
Deliver *something* that technically meets the requirements
Get an "attaboy" from the CEO on the heroic work done by everyone involved
I'm not even being sarcastic. This is how it works. ICD-10 ring any bells?
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.
* 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/
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article says this, like it's a bad thing.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If you know competent Accenture employees, persuade them to quit.
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