Slashdot Mirror
Oregon Sues Oracle For "Abysmal" Healthcare Website
SpzToid (869795) writes The state of Oregon sued Oracle America Inc. and six of its top executives Friday, accusing the software giant of fraud for failing to deliver a working website for the Affordable Care Act program. The 126-page lawsuit claims Oracle has committed fraud, lies, and "a pattern of activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars". "Not only were Oracle's claims lies, Oracle's work was abysmal", the lawsuit said. Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said. "Today's lawsuit clearly explains how egregiously Oracle has disserved Oregonians and our state agencies", said Oregon Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum in a written statement. "Over the course of our investigation, it became abundantly clear that Oracle repeatedly lied and defrauded the state. Through this legal action, we intend to make our state whole and make sure taxpayers aren't left holding the bag."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
HAHA!
I hope they get it good... bastards.
Place the realm blame where it belongs and leave Oracle alone.
They should both pay each other 100M and be done with it!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
Can people sue Oracle for "abysmal" exploitation of the legal system?
I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.
Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.
Larry Ellison just bought Oregon.
I'm pretty sure for 240 million I'd be able to do it from my bedroom.
"is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." It shouldn't be their job, that's what they paid you for.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
...taxpayers are always left holding the bag. There are no exceptions.
For me as a total but interrested outsider it looks like the closet republican Larry is took his chance to frustrate decent healthcare.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Promised software products?
On the one hand, I'm glad someone with deep pockets is going after Oracle. They are a terrible company that screws over their customers and developers. On the other hand everyone knows Oracle is a terrible company so I don't think Oregon is blameless. Taking out a contact with Oracle is like throwing money out the window of a moving car and anyone doing business with Oracle gets what they deserve.
I'm starting to think that State, Provincial, Reigonal, Local and Federal governments should Purchase Technologies from companies, and then hire their own Salaried Engineers to actually handle the operations. Stop creating these service contracts and don't let this nonsense go on.
I have no love for Oracle, but the blame cannot be placed at their feet. As has been reported in local Oregon and nationwide news, Oracle insisted Oregon hire a project manager and systems integrator, either because the contract did not permit Oracle to fulfill those roles or Oracle was not capable of performing those roles. Oregon refused those requests, despite many warnings from Oracle and Cover Oregon's own director that without such services the site would not be ready to go live. Instead, Oregon placed a gag order on everyone involved in the project to hide the problems from the public. This is very much a problem caused by Oregon, not by any willful fraud by Oracle. This is also SOP for Oregon Government, with just about any project they undertake. (Full disclosure, I am one of many pissed off Oregonians.)
Here's a success story about Kentucky's Kynect Exchange.
They need not have worried. Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.
Good answer: "... the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing."
Also, Oracle has been through this perhaps thousands of times. Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted. For example, see this quote from the book, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment:
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
What else do you expect from these dual citizens whose tribe has produced the biggest crooks of history?
My onetime employer had Oracle come in and take over managing their entire employee database system.
At one point a manager asked what it would take to have the letter that the system created to be sent out accepting a new employee changed to add a yellow hilight over a couple of important lines in the Word document.
They told him it would take six hours of programmer time at $200/hour.
He bought a 69 cent hilighter instead.
240 million dollars? For a website? This is amazingly stupid. That is a ridiculous amount of money for the functionality they're looking for.
To bad slashdot comment sections can't be used in court.....
Obviously the technical community really hates Oracle. I personally do. They squeeze people for $40K over 1 more CPU. The whole thing needs to come down in price by about 20 times before I'd ever recommend it.
Only thing is their DB *does* do some cool things nobody else's does. Until you're a PhD level Database guru like one of the guys I worked with who explained all the little "differences", it's not apparently obvious what they do better.
But that doesn't have anything to do with allowing extortion level tactics. I hate this company with a passion!
I have a lot of experience with government customers, and in 95% of cases they don't understand whatever they want and what stands behind it. Few have PMP knowledge or even certificates, many delegate project management to the contractors, like company I'm working at. And this is ok, but in this case it looks like they tried to manage it themselves, failed, and shifting blame to vendor. Management has to speak certain language to the vendors, and this language could only be learned over years of experience.
In this case state want their inability to manage complex projects will be proven in court.
Also worth mentioning, that all of failed projects are flawed from the start, undersized, without a scope with vague contact and so on.
"from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project."
Err, excuse me - if Oracle are the contractor its up to THEM to manage the fecking project. Why the hell should the governor be hands on with this? Do they think he's also down at every roadworks checking the spades?
Usually when you hire a big company like Oracle you give them the requirements, pay them money and they're supposed to deliver the goods, so Oracle whining that they apparently weren't given good enough management is pathetic.
I wonder what are the odds they used some cheap indian labour who can just about switch on a computer much less deliver a working program. Sorry if some people find that racist, but indian coders in my experience are universally bloody useless.
I dare Oracle to audit just exactly who worked on this project - how many H1-B's at Oracle and foreign outsourcing.insourcing was done (probably, to India). I will bet hard $$$ that a majority of the work for Oregon was done this way. What I have seen over and over again is more and more H1-B garbage code put into BASIC infrastructure projects. Oracle and other companies walk away with profit, and we're left holding a bag of garbage.
Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Five. One to change the bulb and four more to chase off the Californians who have come up to relate to the experience.
they read the EULA.
I'm an Oregonian, and there has been very little information about what actually happened other than the corporate/govenment spin weasels point fingers and whining about the other guy.
To be honest, our state can certainly screw up just like all the rest and on various levels. Just google Dynamite Whale for one example.
On the other hand, my experiences with Oracle and what I've heard from other people that had to deal with them, are far less than stellar.
Right now I'm betting some politician made some stupid mistakes that Oracle didn't bother to even attempt to correct because all they could see was $$. Which of course was compounded by Oracle then going on in a slipshod milk the government cash cow way. The end result being this F-N mess.
How to recover from this? Honestly, I don't really know, especially because we haven't been told what the exact problems are with the system. Sure, we've been told lots of the symptoms, but not the actual problems. (The difference between someone saying my car makes this "kchunk-wnnnng noise", vs "my car's timing belt is slipping".)
One suggestion that might be necessary is to throw out the old code, and go talk to someone with a good working version and license that one for a reasonable fee then rebrand and localize it. (Maybe Kentucky's version.) And no, a reasonable fee isn't what they paid for it if it's something they had developed. Maybe there are other states with lousy versions, and they could all license a good working version. It would sure as hell simplify things going forward for all of them.
I'd like to see the correlation with moving targets and whether the project originated from the military itself (discretionary spending) or originated from congressional mandate. A few other variables to measure congressional micromanagement would probably make for a very interesting regression line.
Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted.
This 100 times. I am amazed again and again that big government projects are almost guaranteed to be over budget and late, and I don't mean 10% in either case. After having this 5000 times, which idiots write the contracts that still don't contain massive penalties for those cases? Grab them by the balls when they promise you the heavens and tell them to deliver or shut up.
Nothing short of corruption can explain this, because I refuse to believe that someone can be this stupid and at the same time still remember how breathing works.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Can we sue oracle for a shitty Java? If only...
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
What you get with Big Companies is lots of Lawyers. There is more money to be made doing exactly what the contract says then doing the job correct. If you do exactly what you are asked to do in the worst way possible you get paid once to do this and keep getting paid to support and modify.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
The book is wrong, it isn't a "sociological mistake." The problems tend to come from changing requirements (from the gov and events), under bidding (by the company), stop and start funding and various directives (from the Congress), legal challenges from the losing competitors, and the nature of the procurement system.
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That is "Really Big-O" notation, to which you can add, "Oh no!"
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
How much of a ship can uncle Larry buy for $220 million? I bet a nice one with big sails, crows nest and working cannons.
Arrr mates.. raise the blue peter and set sail for fail
As a consultant I worked on Oregon's Medicaid system, directly with Oregon senior IT management. It was the first government work I'd done after swearing I never would again 20 years previous, for reasons many are familiar with.
It was shocking; those folks were top notch! No drama, no politics, no crap - just smart people who came to work to get things done, and did it well. I actually looked forward to meetings with the Oregon team because they were that sharp.
I can't say how many of those people might be there now, but knowing them they would have managed their successions too. If those folks think Oracle failed, not only did Oracle probably fail hard, but they will have that fail documented, down to every dotted i and crossed t. Those folks should have been working in the valley.
I should have said, "an enormous, extremely profitable business for those who control the government".
I'll "third" it. My wife needed to use Kynect when I retired. At first there were several bumps. Eventually she was put into contact with a "manager" who looked at the system output for her case, said "nope, not your fault, that looks like a system error", and promptly while my wife was on the telephone with her, over-rode the system to correct it. Things have been fine since.
I suspect Kentucky isn't rich or pretentious enough to try to do everything Oregon might. For development work, it's not a bad mindset.
Oracle is just a DB. In a website built over a database, the database is just a tool, you can hardly blame it for anything.
If Oracle doesn't have the authority to compel teams of government employees to finalize their requirements, then they by definition Oracle isn't running the project.
Even when Governments see it coming, and try to get out, they still get bent over.
Oracle has tons of military contracts. You don't have to only make fighter jets or oil wells to get military contracts.
ORACLE shut down AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES Sonoma CA campuses while we tried to untangle the mess they gave us.
We are currently in our own form of Oracle hell the higher ups bough into to this new oracle "Solution" for a problem we have (being incidentally vague because i know people at my office read Slashdot) Is causing some of us to pull our hair out. Its truly a fix 1 bug create 3 more type problems over and over. If its not feeding garbage data into our other systems its eating it own tail and corrupting data (Thank goodness for good backups).
Can anyone explain why Oregon is suing six executives as well as the company itself? Normally in such commercial litigation it is only the company that is liable, not individual employees, and if Oregon thinks that the executives went beyond the pale, you'd expect criminal charges. Furthermore, the executives presumably don't have enough assets to contribute substantially to the damages sought. So why are the executives defendants?
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
Killing people - not so profitable. Threatening to kill them - very profitable. That's where the power is at. Things are the way they are because most people support men with guns making it that way.
Manual overrides are key to most designs, particularly in new systems.
It's not going to all work perfectly. Not gonna happen. Make sure a person can brute force a solution. You can automate more when the requirements are better understood, and have stabilized.
The goal should be a *process* that works, whatever the tech, and that includes *people*.
Larry was heard laughing and saying "Oregon confused selling with delivering.."
Organization? You must be joking..
In the US the public is armed, and the government doesn't threaten to kill the public. Things are the way they are because of laws.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Every law is an implicit threat of violence, backed by guns.
Because instead of holding corporations to their promises and showing them who owns the tanks, governments in the west have spent the past 10 years selling themselves to the cheapest bidder, with treaties allowing corporations to sue governments if they dare pass laws that impact profits.
Sometimes I wish we had a king with a big ego, who'd on as much as the proposal of such a treaty arrest all those corporate bigshots and hang them publicly.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I work in healthcare IT and without a doubt I can honestly say that the bigger the vendor, the shittier their product. My health system is implementing 3M Computer Assisted Coding. It's been a nightmare with the vendor telling us that they support various versions of IE, but really only support the latest and greatest (which until this last version of EPIC we couldn't move to). They can't get their interfaces correct and our in-house written bridge from our digital document storage system to their system has been a pain in the ass to write because they keep leaving out little "gotchas" on their HL7 specifications.
This has been the same damn thing with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and hell even Cisco has fucked us once or twice. One thing I can't help but notice is that all of these companies share one thing: they've outsourced their support and they're focusing on cheap rather than quality.
That those lazy expensive in-house government employees. The invisible hand fairy ensures that Oracle and other contractors is the best way to get work done. Right? Right?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Not really, no. At least not in the US.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Corporations play the system. But to shift a bit of the blame back to the customer, with some projects government bureaucrats constantly change their ill-thought-out requirements, meaning the client has to redo everything.
I've had no contact with the Care Oregon people, but my 20-plus years of contact with State Department of Human Services (DHS) IT management (as a contractor to local governments) has shown me just the opposite. Over that time what I observed was a massive NIH complex that can reasonably be described as arrogant, paired with equally massive incompetence.
Their trail is littered with failed projects. For example, look at Oregon Pathways, with which I was closely involved in its early stages. Pathways spent more than $500k and actually won national awards for excellence--without producing more than a mocked-up demo. Lots of time and money sent swirling down the drain.
Better still, look at a project that actually was built and is in use today: Oregon Access. It was conceived in the 1990's by DHS as a PC-based (Sybase/Powerbuiler) replacement for mainframe systems used to administer Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. It also was intended to give local governments that do the actual case work extensive 'access' to client data in the system for their own use in management--hence the project name. The first parts of the system were put into production use in the late '90s (I worked on some local-gov installs).
The first casualty occurred early on and it was. ironcally, access. Only one county (Lane) was able to connect to the system before direct database access was eliminated, so that only the inteface devloped by DHS could be used. The mainframes never were replaced, so the poor users had to learn two systems: Windows-based Access and text-based mainframe running in a terminal emulator (later replaced by an IE6-only Web interface).
My view of Access was from the user end. A substantial amount of my business came from developing software for users that filled gaps in Access. For example, Medicaid-funded Adult Protective Services. State management decided that they needed extensive statistics that Access did not provide. Their solution was simple: tell the local offices to generate it themselves. I was engaged by one to develop a database application that would enable them to do that. Plus, we added such obvious things as searching cases by name so they could get a case number--which was the only way to find a case in Access! (When, a few years later, that unit was transferred to the State, they killed the application so that the work had to be done by hand.)
For the user, Oregon Access is a nightmare. Consider this page of case management tools for APD (Aging and People with Disabilites) staff. I particularly like the 191-slide Powerpoint stack that explains the "basics" of using just the client assessment portion of Access. And note the PDF forms that have to be filled out and emailed to Salem.
Better still are the forms (not seen there) that are generated from within Oregon Access using internal data, which are then printed by the case manager and faxed or mailed (USPS) to Salem, where they are processed by someone using Oregon Access. Duh. I can't tell you the hilarity that ensued when the local folks received notice of the State's response to complaints about this lunacy: install a "Print to file" printer and PDF-conversion software, then for each use of a form, go through the many-step process of printing, converting, and attaching it to an email instead of fax or surface mail. Problem solved!
Now, Cover Oregon is a product of the Oregon Health Authority, which was split off from DHS. Bruce Goldberg, OHA director during this mess, was previously director of DHS. The evidence seems to refute the notion that all the incompetence of DHS was left behind when OHA branched off.
My personal view is that this affair is nicely characterized by: "Incompetent Mark Meets Con Artist".
I've had bad experiences myself, though it's a field I have little interest personally. There seems to be a market opportunity.
Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said.... seeking $200 million in damages.
I don't know why the hell they went with Oracle.
I'd have taken the job for $201 million dollars.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
>Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project.
When a client pays you sums of money that reach this proportion, you would think that they have 0 interaction to do, and would have 100% support of any type of situation possible.
I developed softwares from a-z from start to finish including dev, deploy and support, and I can rest assured that a health care system should not cost this much, let alone give the client such limited service as to say they would still need to be interactive in the configuration, maintenance or deployment of the product.
Oracle to me is the worst overpriced and underworking company out there, they beat IBM , Microsoft and any others for the amount of services provided for the amount they charge. Everyone knows (as a running joke) if you want to make money, get certified as Oracle pro, and you can charge limitless amounts of money...even though technically a MSSQL certified pro could easily surpass in knowledge or service what is offered by way of Oracle.
I worked with Oracle recently and found a glitch in their new 12.0 version of a specific dll responsible for communicating in background...and saw a performance hit based on which version of the client connecting to the new 12.0 db. SO an older client 10.0 dll would not get same sql query execution time then a new client 12.0 dll. In the end, it was because they added new way of pooling queries being searched, and the indexing of the queries was taking longer with older dlls.
I would think this one of those corrupted moves that force all companies to upgrade ALL Oracle components (instead of just a backend)..and get even more money.
I really didnt like their product when compared to the ease of use and speed of dev. of MSSQL. All earlier features that Oracle was known for are now also available with MSSQL, so no more reasons to select Oracle at all..... they even just got around now (15 years after MS) of adding proper increment seeds to their tables....
Overall again, dont like the product as it is way overpriced as all are finding out the hard way now...
Have you been to the US, seen any US television, or read ANYTHING about the US in the last few years? Because it seems like you haven't and are just talking out your arse. Cops there are a constant threat of violence for any (or no) reason.