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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."
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
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.
Free market would, but there was no free market in this case. Oligarchy at best.
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.