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Oregon vs. Oracle: the Battle of Blame Heats Up
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "The ongoing efforts to assign responsibility for the disastrous attempts to create the Cover Oregon health exchange, the primary contractor for which was Oracle Corporation, have entered a new round, with Governor John Kitzhaber calling on State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to initiate legal action against the firm. Kitzhaber has also sought the help of Washington D.C. in sanctioning Oracle, though Oregon's own management of the project and the terms of their contract with Oracle muddy the waters, considerably. Although the AG's office hasn't committed to filing suit, yet, AG Rosenblum has said, 'I share your determination to recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled.' Although the outcome of this is uncertain, it is likely heads, both corporate and political, will roll."
She did not commit to filing suit, but said, "I share your determination to recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled."
You can say a lot of words without promising anything. I particularly like "recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled". It could be $0 or $1 or $100M, because she didn't mention how much that is in her opinion.
Anytime a large project goes down in flames like this, both the 'company' and the contractor are at fault.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or:
Another contract which was contracted out to a large corporate entity has not delivered, way over budget, and fully into the blame part of the project.
I live in Washington state, and I think we're to blame - at least in part. All those Oregon programmers kept coming north to smoke weed here. I was a bit surprised Oregon didn't have plenty of its own already, given its reputation; but no, you'd see those guys all over the place asking "where can I find the good stuff, man. The GOOD stuff! I need a hookup, man!"
Our own health insurance exchange did well after the first week - that's when we fired all the stoners and hired every Mormon coder we could find.
#DeleteChrome
Or...
Once again Oracle proves that it is incapable of delivering functional products on time and within budget. Why PHBs still get wood for them is a wonder.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Oregon produced an audit of the Oracle Debacle here: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs... The audit answered the wrong questions. It accepted the magical notions and vapor roles of Oracle's corporate propaganda. For example, it focuses on the need for a 'systems integrator', as if every engineer should -not- be responsible for integration. The two big problems: 1) The computer industry's current authoritarian obsession with subdivided tasks, specialization, core competence, detailed requirements, 'no surprises' (meaning no good surprises, either), and dogmatic 'best practices' has created a generation of corporate slaves who aren't allowed to use their minds or take responsibility for anything important. 2) Which brings us to motivation. Oracle and other corporate oligarchs only want money. They have no responsibility to do anything else. Maximizing the bill is the sole priority. Three programmers, picked at random, who live in Oregon, and who have friends that need insurance, would have finished this job with FOSS, not proprietary software, in half the time a fraudulent Oracle and a corrupt State's office took to generate a broken system.
The majority of Republican-run states refused to set up their own marketplace, they refused to expand Medicaid, and so your statement could be literally true, but also fallacious.
Perhaps you could list those states which had competently run exchanges and effective expansions of Medicaid?
Free market would, but there was no free market in this case. Oligarchy at best.
Should have went with Metal Toad.
Except that Oracle had control on some of the healthcare sites for larger states and delivered a working product on time; also Oracle was part of the team that was brought in to fix the main site and are credited by Obama himself for getting that working.
Oregon is just an example of poor management, from picking the products to use before having requirements, using the wrong type of contract, and then not doing proper check and those checks that were done were ignored by the government management.
When Oregon’s new Chief Information Officer, Alex Pettit,was on our show recently, we asked him what stood out from his move from Oklahoma to the northwest. He said there were some expected cultural differences, but that in terms of IT he was caught by surprise:
I was surprised that things like open source wasn’t as bigin government as it is in the East Coast, or in Oklahoma, where I was. I was surprised that transparency wasn’t a bigger issue. It’s certainly a big issue in Oklahoma, and it’s less so here.
This was striking because Oregon is known for its open source community — at Oregon State’s Open Source Lab, at the annual OSCON Conference, and among many programmers. And his comments came right before an Oregonian op-ed argued that open source software could have prevented the Cover Oregon fiasco.
http://www.opb.org/radio/progr...
The only mistake that may have been made by Oregon State gov. tech people was letting Federal officials talk into going outside Oregon for the website project.
Oracle is less likely to get future government contracts in other states or levels if they have the reputation for being a drama queen and "difficult", regardless of fault. They may be better off quietly negotiating a compromise and eating some of the costs in the short term. Is the loud approach part of their Ellison bravado culture?
You've obviously never done business with Oracle. Oracle has the same attitude about their customers as Microsoft did in the 90s. The just don't fucking care. You HAVE to have them. Everything corporate IT is in some way related to Oracle and Cisco. If you want to use anything else, you need smarter (higher paid) people, software that's not as common, and it's harder to find people that know juniper for example. Oracle knows this, but they overplay their hand. I don't know many people that like Oracle anymore. I know at least 3 companies I've worked with that have sued, and won cases against them. Nearly every contract I've been involved with them in has ended in legal negotiations of some sort. We avoid them like the plague now, but for some things we have no other choice.
I used to work at the State of Oregon Datacenter. Open source is highly avoided. When I was there a few years ago, there were only about 150-200 Linux machines (virtual and physical), if memory serves. There were thousands of Windows servers, many of which could have just as easily been Linux. The entire atmosphere is that of, "avoid Linux, avoid open source." It's as if management is intent on spending lots of money. Even though I still live in Oregon, I've been laughing every time something new comes out with this Oregon vs. Oracle debacle. Knowing how the state's data center runs, it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where the crux of the problem lies with Oracle (and I am no fan of Oracle).
(I realize that Linux is not synonymous with open source. There are plenty of other open source projects, many/most of which can run on Windows as well. My use of Linux is just as a general example of how, generally, open source is handled there. Also, while I think their decisions to avoid open source are problematic, the greater issue is their overall inability to manage people. When I left that job, morale was at an all-time low, as management kept discovering new ways to make their employees' work lives more difficult.)