Slashdot Mirror
Ex-Head of Troubled Health Insurance Site May Sue, Citing 'Cover-Up'
itwbennett writes "Carolyn Lawson, the former CIO for Oregon's troubled health care insurance website, is alleging that state officials engaged in a 'substantial cover-up' meant to deflect blame away from themselves and onto herself and the project's contractor, Oracle. Lawson, who was forced to resign in December, this week filed a tort claim notice, which is a required precursor to filing a lawsuit against the state."
Claims are made that the state was the typical bad client, refusing to articulate "business requirements" effectively and repeatedly increasing the scope of the project. But then again Oracle was involved.
Everyone knows the first thing you do in a government contract situation is document what you did so you can cover your ass later. I can't wait to see what dirt she has on Oracle sandbagging Oregon.
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell - The Oatmeal.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I think a Bayesian analisys is in order here.
Basically the prior probability of Oracle delivering crap and screwing up a contract while collecting a vast fee approaches one, let's say P(oracale == shit) = 0.99999.
Given that prior, we really need overwhelming evidence in favour of Oracle before I'll believe it wasn't their fault. Actually I think 0.99999 is rather generous. That means they've probably delivered at least one system which didn't utterly fuck over a customer. That seems like a really dubious claim to me.
So, I'm gonna go with "bet you 50 bucks it was Oracle's fault".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oracle was involved. Need we go any further?!
At a certain point, "refusing to articulate "business requirements" effectively and repeatedly increasing the scope of the project" becomes the primary reason for project failure.
This invariably gets blamed on the project people and the contractors by the client, but the reality is if the client makes it impossible to get the job done through their own stupidity, blaming everyone else for that failure is just CYA by those who really caused the project to fail.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
I'm betting the exact same things happened with the Federal one.
And I suspect most of us have been there.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Obviously, some projects are impossible and some clients just can't be helped. I'm certainly not rushing to judge Ms. Lawson, because I've had my fair share of those.
But ... usually, the blame can be laid at the feet of the project leader (I'd guess, in this case, the CIO). Managing expectations, dealing with a changing business landscape, keeping everyone focused on your vision and strategy ... those are all responsibilities of the project leader.
How often do we have to hear stories like this? Doesn't anyone learn? Virtually all clients are "bad clients" if you define them by the inability to articulate business requirements and a penchant for expanding the scope. This is normal, not exceptional. If you can't deal with that, then you shouldn't be running development projects. Things will change, the world doesn't stand still. Get used to it.
In short, stop complaining and do your fucking job.
This is a total trolling comment.
First, Oracle **is** a large IT development company and they screwed the site up....they have a (well earned) reputation for screwing up projects
IT experience? You mean has she ever hooked up a router?
She knew enough to ask questions that got her fired...and she was told to help in the cover up!
2nd, Lawson was & still is one of the few who speak out about the **actual** problems of the exchange
Thank you Dave Raggett
TFA:
A scathing investigative report recently conducted by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services put blame on both Oracle and Cover Oregon officials for the project's woes.
Parent:
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
You can, however, make it REAL clear and document that the client was informed about the ramifications of their indecisiveness and scope creep. IF Oracle was doing their job correctly, they would have plenty of documentation to back up that they were in no way at fault or better still, the client was helped in creating clear specs.
They don't.
What I think happened were that the guys in the expensive suits and Rolex watches (Oracle's salespeople) were doing what they do best - getting more revenue by encouraging the client to act against their best interests.
A poorly managed project means more money for the vendor.
And I just have to ask, WTF was the CIO doing? Why wasn't she holding Oracle's feet to the fire and sending letters written by lawyers?
insurance rates were going to go up anyways, have a pre-existing condition before OC, you were going to loose your insurance anyways. Quit spreading right-wing fud. With the exchanges I'm free from the shackles of my crappy employee insurance and can not contract on my own and buy insurance on the exchange at about the same rate I paid before.
You want to talk about horrific laws, how about the medicare part - d, or the invasion of Iraq, or the patriot act.
I've read that the Governor is heavily failed to be re-elected. Why is this true given the clearly bad job his administration did here?
This just gets more and more entertaining.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.
In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.
And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project.
I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I have a hard time taking anyone serious that doesn't know the difference between "loose" and "lose".
feminists who get to force taxpayers and Catholics to pay for their abortions
There is no rational reason to not pay for abortions. Firstly, it appears that having available abortions does nothing to increase the rate: women who REALLY don't want to have a kid will find a way not to. The results are however dangerous and and much more frequently result in injury.
Therefore from a life preservation perspective, not having abailable abortions does not in fact save babies lives (in fact it serves only to endanger lives). From an economic perspective having them unvailable causes injuries to people who do have them which removes potential workers, increases poverty and that generally leads to more crime.
Hence there is no rational reason to not oay for them, especially as we make people pay for many other things for the greater good (e.g. police, fire department, roads, military, etc).
So please stop whining about imaginary enemies.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The US has healthcare costs nearly double the next first world country and it was that way before Obamacare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... Private healthcare is the villain you are looking for.
I thought I was the only competent project management person here. Do you have a PMI membership?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's now apparent that Obama and the Democrats were lying when they said people could keep their insurance, lying when they said people could keep their doctors, lying when they said families would save $2,500 a year on their insurance, and lying when they said it would extend health care coverage to most of the uninsured (who are largely not signing up). Millions of people have lost their insurance or had huge hikes in their premiums.
The only people the law has been good for are insurance companies, Medicaid bureaucrats who get to expand their budgets, feminists who get to force taxpayers and Catholics to pay for their abortions and people paid to make those insulting "get covered" ads.
As far as I can tell, ObamaCare has not a single defender outside the ranks of Obama's defenders and the Democratic Party.
It's a horrific law that should be repealed in full.
Yes, it should be repealed in full.
Speaking of horrific, what did the trend look like before Obamacare came along for insurance premiums? Oh yeah, that's right...gee, can't wait to get back to that shit.
Claims are made that the state was the typical bad client
And yet it's only after you sign the contract that you think to get a lawyer involved.
In a strange world where 15 is nearly double 11, yes.
They'll twist their disaster into a tort victory.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc? The contactor can essentially stop work on the project if necessary, mandate that some scope increases will result in increased up-front fees and automatic schedule adjustments, etc.
For better or for worse, these problems exist at small-scale projects and large-scale projects. I do small SMB projects and we run into the same issues, except our owners are too greedy/timid to deal effectively with them.
But I would figure an outfit run by sharks like Oracle would have figured this out long ago and had the leverage and basic schmaltz to make client indecision, scope creep, etc difficult to get away with and very expensive.
Right, except for the part where when the state brought in outside consultants to try to determine WHY things were so off-tilt, the consulting firms (yes, more than one) told them they didn't have the staff in house to properly scope the project. When Lawson was made aware of this, she simply gave more money to Oracle to provide contractors who could scope it for them. NOW she's claiming it's the state's fault for not scoping... MY HEAD HURTS.
:/
Read a great article on it a couple months ago and am struggling to find it
Your theory of lawyers being the cause of expensive health care has been studied extensively and it is wrong. Malpractice insurance/ lawsuits/ defensive medicine/ etc. only contributes 1 or 2 % to the high cost of health care. If you'd like to read about this, here are some good places to start:
http://theincidentaleconomist....
http://theincidentaleconomist....
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior."
Nice "fun fact" but it is wrong.
This has been carefully studied by many authors and ER visits went down, admissions through the ER went down, more people visited their primary care doctors, etc.
Here is a good summary of a real study (not just Fox news "fun facts") with links to the actual studies:
http://blog.academyhealth.org/...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What I find humorous about the current topic and the posts being flung onto the wall like so much feces is that posts like yours good sir, whether I agree or not, add to the discussion and yet are being modded flamebait for no real apparent reason. After this modding, posts such as yours usually have a small flood of ACs follow your commentary with short, witless posts which quite frankly add nothing to the discourse. I'm all for being an AC from time to time, as it serves a purpose. However, at the moment, it feels like it is being abused by one or a few select individuals whose goals seem to be to misrepresent the dialog being built under this topic and burying that which they do not agree with.
Now, mind you my post is off-topic and I will expect it will be modded as such, as the flood of AC seems to be cresting quite the large wave as of late. This AC behavior has been growing as of late, and seems most apparent on politically charged topics. I only hope this pattern is temporary and just wished to say, bravo for having the balls to attach your name to your beliefs.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Is that if she has a paper trail showing specific government employees kept screwing the pooch that she likely cannot hit them personally such that they lose their shirts in the lawsuit. It shouldn't be primarily the tax payers who foot the bill, it should be the senior government executives who kept messing up. And if their federal counterparts' compensation is any indication, those responsible here have more than enough salary to be expected to foot the bill here for their malfeasance.
the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed.
Most studies indicate that after an initial spike, the number of ER visits fell over a period of several years.
I personally know people who moved to other states because the health insurance requirement meant that they lost their job.
So we shouldn't have health insurance for everyone because a few people lost jobs and found different ones elsewhere?
And because the new Massachusetts website was made by the same people who made Healthcare.gov, it still doesn't work
Heathcare.gov works fine. The majority of the people in my company used it to sign up (including myself) and it worked fine. For the few people who did have an issue (weird social security issues) they were able to call the hotline numbers and get enrolled. You do not have to simply rely on the website if it, for whatever reason, is not working for you. There are alternative ways to sign up.
By the end of the month, they still won't have insurance, and the deadline to sign up will pass.
They've had months to sign up. If they haven't by the deadline it is because they didn't put any effort into doing so. I've done it and it isn't hard.
I'm really having trouble figuring out what a heart condition has to do with a guys throat or cancer in general. If this is for real, then this is the kind of crap and nonsense that is driving people to socialized medicine. If true, the insurance companies are running amok and state regulators are not doing their job.
"Big Government" steps in when the market and state governments fail.
Big Government gets a lot of criticism while Big Business gets a free pass and is allowed to act without any oversight or regard to it's customers, it's employees, or society at large.
This situation is a clear example of "Big Business screws the little guy".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
LOL, I work on the tech side of house ... which means I've seen quite a few projects end up going this way.
Often, the client is the biggest impediment to successful completion -- either because they have no clue what they want, or all of the players are still trying to carve out and preserve their own little fiefdoms and protect their own little patch they've had for years.
Usually, the goal of the project conflicts with the people who want to retain absolute control over one aspect or another, or clients who can't even tell you what the specifications are and should be -- and when they do, you inevitably find out they're all bloody well wrong in the first place.
With government contracts (not exclusively, but often), I find it even worse as every little petty manager insists his little widget is the single most important thing in the world, or the political infighting between departments.
It really becomes impossible to do anything when the client tells you 5 contradictory statements in the same meeting, and changes those in every other meeting.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
> Then bashing a successful business like oracle.
Yes. How DARE we criticize "job creators" and our corporate overlords!
Don't confuse the success of their RDBMS product with any ability to deliver on promises in ANY other area. Even those of us that are fans of their RDBMS will readily admit that they fall down pretty much completely anywhere else.
Your adoring attitude of Oracle is EXACTLY why they get these contracts that they don't really deserve. It's a cult of marketing that leads to their product being used even when it is gross overkill.
For projects that don't warrant a 60K per CPU database, MySQL is a very respectable product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My impression is that this minor issue cost two hundred million dollars, and prevented anybody from signing up for insurance (as in 0 enrollments) for 5+ months. It also did it in the most public possible way, with a credible case for the Governor not telling the truth about what he knew and when. But I'm not from Oregon and this might only be a false impression. Perhaps someone who's followed this closely can fill in the details.
I can pretty much believe it..
In the Govenmental areas, there are so many people that are used to being able to say "Yes, but wouldn't it be a great idea if...".. And when they're told no, it's not possible in the current scope, they bring in all kinds of political manoeuvers to make life extremely difficult unless it gets added (and these manoeuvers can extend time drastically). So, more gets added that they should have identified initially. Or it can be a 'clarification'. "Oh, we meant this.. In this context.. Sort of. Until we change our minds."
They aren't used to thinking critically. They aren't used to doing specifications (and they actively resist attempts to perform a full specification gather, as "they don't have time for all those useless questions". They have "things to do,don't you know").
That's when it starts out as a big project.. Some smaller ones can actually start with a well defined set of requirements, and be entirely achievable. They other people hear that there's funding attached to a project, so they want a slice of the pie.. Get themselves on the steering groups, have the "bright ideas that weren't there originally that just _have_ to be put in there now", and move things in an entirely different direction. Or at least pull in it, as there are usually a whole bunch of people pulling in different directions, getting opposing things added to the requirements.
Sometimes you get lucky and find that there's someone with clout who is also technically savvy, and they can stamp on internal rubbish and let a project go properly.. Unfortunately, they're reasonably rare, and the voices that understand the reality of it are drowned out by the higher management that haven't touched tech, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, and believe if they have a bright idea, someone will wave a magic wand and the solution will magically appear.
I have been involved in a lot of database project over the years on a variety of platforms. Only two of them were Oracle and both of them were multi-year multi-million dollar fiascoes. One of them was ripped out and replaced with a home brew solution built by staff on SQL Server less than two years later. The only good thing that I can think of to say about Oracle is that they're not based in Seattle so I don't have to deal with their people.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Do you have an non-anecdotal evidence for your theory?
http://content.healthaffairs.o... seems to contradict your claim with actual data - though it's data is getting old, so maybe you have something newer rather than just making up theories in your head with no actual evidence for them?
I live in Oregon. I have been trying to buy health insurance for myself and my family of 4. Because of my income, I am ineligible for any subsidies. My case is a very simple one. I am paying full price for a health insurance plan. However I cannot register on the damn website or buy insurance. The only way for me to register an account on the website is by mailing in a paper application. I have done that. They called me to confirm that they have received the application and are processing it. They have hired 500 people to process paper applications. These people have yet to enter my paper application into the computer.
How did Oracle receive $130 million for developing this website when I cannot even register a damn account on this website, much less select and buy insurance?
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.
In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.
And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project. I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.
I have yet to meet a 3rd party contractor or consulting firm who bids on a project *not* attempt to extort additional money when it suddenly doesn't meet the scope of the project. That's business as usual for everyone.
"Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior." Nice "fun fact" but it is wrong. This has been carefully studied by many authors and ER visits went down, admissions through the ER went down, more people visited their primary care doctors, etc. Here is a good summary of a real study (not just Fox news "fun facts") with links to the actual studies: http://blog.academyhealth.org/...
Except these operating room visits are now covered by insurance. Instead of being uninsured and costing the state the full amount.
So Oracle + government + morons in charge causing scope creep + IT contractors. That's a recipe for a category 5 shitstorm.
Several whistle-blowers came forward and said that this lady, Carolyn Lawson, was "abusing and misusing state resources". Oregon's OHA director Bruce Goldberg thought that these were personality conflicts.
Also, she was accused of and investigated for mismanaging contracts when she worked for the state of California. In one instance she tried to award a no-bid contract to her previous boss.
I don't think she has a leg to stand on.
So you're saying Oracle's malfeasance and ineptitude was widely know prior to them being contracted to build Oregon's exchange.
I'm sorry, but that paper that you posted, did you actually read it? It's written by 3 laywers and one medical person who works at a law school. And let me pull some of my favorites which make me question the paper.
"There is no comprehensive, national repository of information on medical malpractice claims" - in other words, they have to make inferences and aren't basing their work off of hard numbers.
"We took the approach of itemizing indemnity and administrative costs rather than reporting total premium costs for two reasons" - So, they're not actually counting the cost of the insurance, but their viewed numbers on what the actual legal cost is, not the total cost. Total cost is the portion that jacks rates up. They say it themselves, their analysis is arguable at best for it's accuracy.
This one is a bit long
"It is impossible to determine how much of the increase in volume constitutes defensive medicine—services performed primarily to reduce liability risk—as opposed to services performed primarily to enhance revenue. Price may also be affected by a reduced supply of medical services. If rising malpractice premiums lead some clinicians to leave practice or reduce the range of services they offer, the remaining providers may be able to charge higher prices.
Such effects are, however, largely theoretical at this point. We did not include effects on prices in our estimates because we were unable to quantify them reliably" - they say afterward because it might be double counting is why they aren't. They don't know.
I'm sorry, but you've posted an article to debunk a theory which says lawyers might be to blame, that was written primarily by lawyers that says they aren't the problem. Surprise! It's a paper that really does feel like it's trying to minimize costs. If you want to debunk something, take worst case, not best case. If the worst case comes out not being very bad, then you've got a point. If your best case comes out not very bad, well, you've discovered nothing.
It's a soft piece at best being that there's a lot of "theoretical numbers" in the paper by their own admission. I don't argue the need for those, because quite simply, again by their own admission, the numbers DON'T EXIST.
States playing favorites with healthcare providers and giving them the same type of monopolies in their states that they do telcos is the problem. There is zero reason why every insurance provider can't compete in every single market, yet states consistently block providers for participating. There is no free market presently.
Each gets half a baby?
Operating room?
Except?
Insurance is a good thing.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
That's a communications issue. Communications face noise from everything imaginable: poor understanding of specific vocabulary, implied meanings based on local (down to sub-city) culture, misalignment of context (person A is thinking in one POV and person B is thinking in another, so the words being said have a completely different meaning), and so on. Communicating effectively is a lot more complex than "use good grammar and speak clearly".
Project managers have banked on technical skills for a long time: the production of work breakdown structures, requirements documentation, and requirements traceability matrixes for scope management; risk breakdown structures, schedules, communications plans; charters to ensure authority; and so on. It's recently become apparent that what we need are people skills: negotiation, diplomacy, stakeholder management, and actual communications skills instead of communications management plans. All of these issues you mention stem from poor people skills.
The reason this happened is simple: soft skills are intangible. Pick up a book on soft skills. Your first reaction will probably be to ridicule it for being a book about obvious things that everyone knows, or just full of pointless fluff with no meaning. Even if it's a really good book full of useful information, most people react this way. Why? Because soft skills are a really open field, and can't be nailed down like hard skills.
Hard skills are immediately rational: if I show you how to create classes in Python, you can apply that with predictable results. Soft skills are not rational: if I explain to you concepts like communications channels (verbal, vocal, non-vocal), business acumen, situational awareness, and diplomacy, you'll recognize most of it but see no actual useful processes in there. People gravitate toward rational hard skills, and away from soft skills that can't be readily forced into a repeatable cause-effect framework. People unlike Kevin Mitnick.
And so here we are: crap situations where nobody communicates well and nobody can actually get a project running. Without stakeholder management, demanding people demand attention: they're noisy, so they get resources, and their unimportant shit gets done instead of important project shit. Without diplomacy and vague concepts like awareness, you can neither control these people nor predict when they'll show up and what they'll want--or worse, how some idiot filing clerk can somehow impact your huge IT project even though he has no organizational power. But all the technical plans say the project was managed correctly--how did it fail?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Dude you're fucking retarded. Oregon is run by Democrats and has been for decades.
This guy was screwed by the very insurance policies that Obamacare stopped, and the article has the audacity to imply that his old plan was better.
...when a scapegoat doesn't understand its role.
-Styopa
I believe, unless there is yet another rule change on this, that those seeking subsidies have to go through the exchange.
I set out to use the GDP per capita of Switzerland and the US (the two first on the list given by GP) to show you how you didn't use the numbers correctly. It turned out that the spendings on health care per capita of the two countries are almost the same*, and the joke was on me.
*(8676.91 $US per capita per year for Switzerland and 8272.64 $US per capita per year for the US)
Colour me surprised!
taxpayers AND catholics?
why aren't these catholics paying taxes in the FIRST place!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I got a chance to *try* to use the back end product the other day. I got as far as trying to enter my social security number into a three character wide textbox that automatically shrinks the font to fit. Ended up about two pixels high and totally unreadable. And that's even before we got to the point where, in applying for insurance for a family with mixed incomes, you had the choice of income from "employment", "self-employment", or "dependent" all mutually exclusive.
I give up. My time is worth more to me than the annual fine.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Is there a way that both sides can lose a lawsuit?
Yes. A judgment that doesn't cover legal fees would probably be a loss for both sides.
I'm not really taking Oracle's side on this but having worked on a lot of Government (Local, State, Federal) projects over the years I have seen this sort of thing happen time and time again.
The first problem you encounter is that, almost without exception, government projects are fixed bid rather than time and materials. The procurement system requires them to do it that way. Fixed bid projects can be successful - but only if you tightly control scope and expectations. And in my experience, scope creep is a way of life on government projects.
The second problem is that when scope creep occurs the project manager, being a political position in large part, will invariably agree to the scope creep to "keep the customer happy". That puts pressure on the rest of the team to deliver more in the same amount of time. Often, quality suffers in the name of getting it done on time.
Problem number three - the customer sometimes doesn't know what they want. Or worse, they think they know and ignore the advise of their consulting partner. Or worse yet, the customer listens to the consulting partner and the partner is giving bad advice. If any of these things happens your project is in deep, deep trouble.
Problem four - salespeople will make unrealistic promises (i.e. they will lie through their teeth) to win the contract. In most places, salespeople are paid their commission based on a percentage of the revenue in the contact. Not what it actually costs to implement the product or service. So by the time the shit hits the fan the salesperson has collected their commission and moved on to the next deal. The project team is left to clean up the mess. If the project goes over budget, or gets cancelled, it has no real impact on the salesperson. They get paid either way. In short, the problem is that the commission is tied to revenue rather than profitability.
Now I've worked with Oracle before. Some of them are very good, some of them are very bad. I suspect that by the time this whole thing is investigated there will enough blame for all sides. Sure, Oracle has screwed up projects before but I'd be very surprised if all the blame lies at their feet on this one.
So, I write business requirements for a living, and I can say that they're almost impossible to get completely right on the first shot, especially when moving into a space where a company has little experience.
Now, companies certainly can do things that make the whole experience better or worse.
What you can't do is just ask the customer to sign off on requirements on day 1, deliver those requirements and a bill for $1M on day 180, and have a system anybody wants to use.
That's the whole reason that techniques like Agile/etc have sprung up. They help a business to gradually discover requirements while still having some kind of framework to ensure steady progress towards some kind of final goal.
While it is true that most projects fail due to poorly defined requirements, what isn't true is that getting the requirements right is something you can count on. The most you can do is manage risks so that your requirements aren't totally off-base, and be prepared to clean up the inevitable mistakes.
"So" in reality, hospitals aren't allowed to refuse treatment and there is exactly zero chance in Hell of that policy ever changing, "so" you'd better just fucking deal with it.
Now quit being a dumbass.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yes, and Oregon may have even known what scoundrels they are. But they are the only company that completed the bid process. Which was so byzantine that the requirements kept changinig while the bid process advanced. When everything was said and done, Oracle was the only company that submitted a complete bid the state could consider.
I have a suspision that the process was built around the concept of give the outside contractor 100 million dollars so they can be blamend intead of us state employees. Tpyically things don't Wile E Coyote blow up in thier face so badly that evenyone involved goes down, but this looks like one of those rare instances where that will happen.
vi +
> I have a suspision that the process was built around the concept of give the outside contractor 100 million dollars so they can be blamed instead of us state employees.
That's just one of the reasons - contractors are corporate scapegoats for hire. But they're also hired so that they can grease the decision makers with kickbacks.
The usual client has no understanding of what they need, demands what they don't need be created yesterday, and changes their minds 5 times before today. The account execs of the contracting firm say "yeah, we can do that, and we'll throw in free pina coladas on fridays", and they'll sign a contract with the client full of nonsensical gibberish that has nothing to do with what needs to be done, and is for the most part ambiguous bs designed to evade precise commitment on either side.
Everyone gets head count, and all the important people get raises and move on to new project before the shit hits the fan.
Sure, but it's being put up against a theory with no numbers or data at all.
I actually used the more-recent numbers for "healthcare spending as % GDP". Arguably, healthcare spending per capita (adjusted for purchasing-power parity) may be more useful, but the gap between the US and other nations is a lot smaller there. Both numbers are available. :-)
Have you ever checked the profitability of private healthcare? It is in a huge boom right now so there is you answer of where all the money is going. Some private healthcare CEOs bonus.
Anyone who has dealt with Oracle knows this. They have all the arrogance, evil and incompetence of Microsoft, except Microsoft at least attempts to make software people can actually use. Oracle's attitude is that if someone, somewhere, with no limit to the amount of effort, headache and voodoo required, can make it work, then it's good enough to ship.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
> That's just one of the reasons - contractors are corporate scapegoats for hire. But they're also hired so that they can grease the decision makers with kickbacks.
Of course, don't forget that contractors more often than not earn the blame they get.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I give up. My time is worth more to me than the annual fine.
Maybe it only works on IE6. Did you try IE6?
What about Mosaic?
I'd make a joke about trying an Archie client, but that would be a step up.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
At a certain point, "refusing to articulate "business requirements" effectively and repeatedly increasing the scope of the project" becomes the primary reason for project failure.
And knowing that this problem is endemic among government contracts is one reason why the whole idea of Obamacare should have been rejected out of hand from Day One. Complain all you want about how horrible private insurance companies are to deal with (and they are), but at some point they need to provide some value or they will go out of business. The Federal government is under no such constraint. There is no penalty for failure, except to trade one incompetent political party for the other every 4 or 8 years. The lifers in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy carry on in perpetuity, and the contractors always make out like bandits.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc?
If 99% of America hadn't collectively forgotten how to manage anything bigger than a lemonade stand, you'd be right. The problem isn't that these projects are badly managed by both the client and contractor... the real problem is that everything is badly managed by almost everybody. We might be making huge leaps in terms of technology, but in terms of the ability to manage large complex operations, especially in the still relatively new technology industry, we are going backwards. Look at any big software company and the tremendous pool of talent they have working for them and compare it to the usually shoddy, lackluster results. Oracle is a perfect example, but almost any tech company will suffice.
That's the real problem.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Seems pretty obvious then, that the state of Oregon is incompetent and are to be blamed for contracting with company that is so widely known to be arrogant, evil, and incompetent.
Seems pretty obvious then, that the state of Oregon is incompetent and are to be blamed for contracting with company that is so widely known to be arrogant, evil, and incompetent.
Precisely. How does Oracle continue to be successful with the reputation they have?
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.