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Social Security Administration Joins Other Agencies With $300M "IT Boondoggle"
alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the SSA has joined the long list of federal agencies with giant failed IT projects. From the article: "Six years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can't say when it will be completed or how much it will cost.
Legacy Systems are built with 40 years of code and modifications to meet every requirement the user needs.
Then you have 5 years to build something new and try to catch 40 years worth of rules and logic.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Until the vendors who are building this system get their company name in the headlines, the status quo will continue.
I've never heard of such a thing. Thank goodness Slashdot is here to challenge our preconceptions.
And, now they'll say it was all the fault of the contractor.
In reality, I suspect it's government infighting, poorly defined (and constantly changing) specs, and congress-critters trying to get a piece of the pie for their own districts.
They always blame the contractor but usually it's being managed by incompetent people without enough accountability and controls.
In fairness, I've seen a lot of legacy migrations fail, because it's often damned near impossible to understand the existing system well enough to write a replacement for it, and then you end up breaking everything which has been integrated with it for years.
I've been on a few large legacy replacement projects which fell squarely on their nose as the project progressed, largely because the system is vastly more complex than the initial analysis, and people make it impossible at every turn.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.
Something tells me that with girlsgonewild.com, the "interaction" is mostly "client-side" so the, er, "workload" is actually minimal. And the use case count, I believe, still stands at 1, and they are at best appealing to exactly half of the US population. It's a bit different than a place like the Social Security Administration, an org that has taken on the unenviable task of managing retirement and disability insurance for *every goddamn american* which is a pretty ludicrous scope. If raw horsepower were the issue, yes bring in outside help. The real problem (or at least one of them) is that of all 65,000 employees, many of them have a specific task since the aforementioned scope is so grand. Try finding a way to economize when you are basically building a system for a small clerical office, and then doing it about 15,000 times with each iteration just different enough from the last to require constant rewrites.
Contractors will give you two basic choices for contracts.
1. Pay for my time. Do what every you want, change what ever you want... but you pay for my time.
2. Specify the project in exact detail and the whole thing will get an over all bid to those specifications. Changes cost extra and may require an additional contract.
I'm assuming the government keeps going with option 1 and I'm thinking most of these issues would go away if they went with option 2.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The reality is that governments - be it in defence or eslewhere - are always moving the goal posts, and the contractors are running to catch up. So in theory option 2 is the best, but it usually doesn't work out as well as it really ought to. The UK is currently playing the same game with a new system for welfare benefits, and it's equally disasterous. And remember - the private sector is often as bad, they usually get to bury their mistakes without publicity!
These sites aren't developed by in house programmers.
Braidamaged, toxic, idiotic, retard conservative culture (You. You heard me. Did I fucking stutter?) has convinced everyone that nothing can be ever developed in house by a government, ever.
It all must be contracted out to whoever can bribe officials the best and can lie on their proposal the best. This method will always go over cost and under deliver. Every time. By design.
When the project blows up, conservatives blame the government and the cheating contractors are free repeat the process to line their pockets again.
What are you talking about? Socialism?
It was Lockheed Martin that did this work.
A for profit company you know. Private business ALWAYS does it better right?
Good thing Lockheed Martin NEVER bungles a sweet Gov contract.
CEO got $25 million last YEAR for pay.. It's not like that is a significant portion of the wasted $300 million or anything.
That by the way was a raise.. Her pay doubled.
I mean, just because they waste millions of tax payers $$ every year does not mean that they should get poverty wages like little people.
Do you know how many pay offs, I mean donations they had to get to steal, I mean get awarded all that tax payer money??
I mean, think of all the time spent on the bribes, I mean sponsored outings, with policy makers!
It's hard work to drink all that booze and eat all that lobster!
Oh, wait, maybe you are just confusing crony capitalism and corruption with socialism.. Yea' maybe that is it.
Braidamaged, toxic, idiotic, retard conservative culture (You. You heard me. Did I fucking stutter?) has convinced everyone that nothing can be ever developed in house by a government, ever.
It's known as "crony capitalism", or "Public-private-partnerships (PPP)", and we called it Fascism in the 1930's and 1940's. Leadership on the "progressive" or "liberal" side is at least as guilty of promoting these things as conservative culture, in fact it seems to be conservatives that want to back away from it, while the Democrats are doubling-down. It was the Democrat governor Mark Warner that handed all of Virginia's IT work over to Northrop Grumman many years ago. And, of course, the liberal appointees at Obama's HHS that outsourced the HealthCare.gov website for millions of dollars more than should have been spent to do it.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Unlike Texas, where the state government employs thousands of programmers because they are so liberal. I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of government programmers from Texas. They'll all tell you the same thing - getting stuff done within red tape of a government agency takes them twice as long as long as it took them in the private sector jobs - unless there is a federal grant or contract involved, in which case it takes twenty times as long.
One project they did last year was for a federal government contract, for OSHA. They spent a year and a half developing the system, then during the beta test OSHA cancelled the project. This is after the feds had them write a system where it would print all the database records on paper, to be sent to the feds, who would manually enter it into a computer file, then send that file back to Texas, right back to the same agency who had sent it to them in the first place. That's about typical for the federal government. Government is one thing - it's supposed to be fair and deliberate, not far and efficient. The FEDERAL government is something else entirely.