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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.
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'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
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 !
...And the worst is yet to come, when some 80 million additional employer-sponsored policies are cancelled
Is this a realistic prediction? I ask because your link is almost two months old, it's a Fox News story with the usual bias against the administration, and the underlying "facts" come from the American Enterprise Institute, of whom George W. Bush gushed, '"I admire AEI a lot--I'm sure you know that," Bush said. "After all, I have been consistently borrowing some of your best people."' And we know how that administration turned out.
I'm not looking for Rachel Maddow's take, but how about something within the last month, from a source that's not rabidly anti-Obama?
Thanks.
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.