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CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

• jnathsf 6y ago
  Deloitte is using salesforce for the underlying technology of the system. So almost all of this work is configuration and maybe some customization. We worked with another state that almost selected Deloitte but they bombed the no cost bake off and ultimately chose another vendor which completed 80% of the work during the bake off. This approach lowers risk dramatically and you’re able to set an aggressive and a more accurate launch date. I hope we see more govts adopting bake-offs for buying IT.
  • tootie 6y ago
    They probably got sold on it being "off the shelf" and just a matter of customization and not coding. But the minute they run into edge cases (of which there are likely hundreds given the nature of the product) they just end up stuck.
    • ianhawes 6y ago
      "COTS software" (commercial off-the-shelf) is the biggest meme in government contracting. I recall reading a 300+ page PDF RFP for a DMV information management system. The state wanted to convert their legacy VB5(!) system to a modern solution and preferred a COTS solution. I am fairly certain there are no COTS software solutions for a statewide DMV that also meets the legislative requirements of the state.
  • jbm 6y ago
    One of the vendors I had the "pleasure" of working for re-implemented Salesforces' approval system in APEX due to an obscenely minor requirement that should have been pushed back on. It's completely believable that Deloitte might have built a handful of boondoggles like that and dressed it up as a "Salesforce" project.
• pickpuck 6y ago
  These are mostly front-end issues. Software is often judged based on these UI/UX nuances, but the complexity of building a competent front-end system remains an undervalued part of the process. The front-end team is usually (1) brought in too late in the game to provide effective feedback and (2) not given enough time to build. When there's not front-end representation at early design reviews or at initial discussions on how APIs should work, then it's easy to forget things like form error handling. Designs don't account for all possible states, services/APIs are in flux, until the very end. Everything else is late, and then all of it has to get slapped together with duct tape and shipped in a few weeks. Performance and browser support be damned.
• andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  > Why was Deloitte awarded the project on a no-bid basis? The contracts claim the company was the only “responsible source”[1] to build the tool. [1]: https://www.acquisition.gov/far/6.302-1 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/6.302-1
  • FireBeyond 6y ago
    Which is horseshit (though we know that). I know of another, far smaller, leaner consulting firm that has handled for at least half a dozen states a contact tracing ecosystem tying into DOH, and utilizing the mobile APIs.
  • stefan_ 6y ago
    Deloitte is a whole lot better manipulating and sweet talking the government than it is at building anything, that is for sure. Surely their track record should see them permanently disqualified?
    • tidepod12 6y ago
      I'm sure if you actually looked at their full track record, the vast vast majority of projects probably result in "mediocre but workable" systems, you just don't hear about them because that's a boring headline. Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure.
      • ndiscussion 6y ago
        > Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure. Citation needed, see Oracle, many companies have grown that large on the backs of taxpayers by employing the best "Sales" techniques in the biz.
        • greggyb 6y ago
          I've worked with many database technologies and many data professionals. I don't recall any instances offhand of technical critiques of Oracle. Pricing and business practices are a different story. Oracle the database is fantastic technology.
• ndiscussion 6y ago
  When will the people have enough? When will the politicians hang?
  • tclancy 6y ago
    Why does it have to be so stupidly strident? Paying giant consultants to build websites is a money sink, sure. Do you think this website was something Congress spent a year deliberating? Or a day? Stop this nonsense.
    • ndiscussion 6y ago
      Oops, this comment will make things more clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975218 They awarded the contract without even getting a bid from anyone else. That's $44 million dollars. That's multiple lifetimes of salaries for the average joe. And they couldn't spend some time deliberating?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • nickthemagicman 6y ago
        There's no accountability because tax money printer go brrr.
  • adultSwim 6y ago
    You want to kill people for a tiny bit of budget waste? Companies waste money all the time.
    • ndiscussion 6y ago
      That's my money. Not a company's. To anyone who disagrees, how is this statement wrong?
      • 6y ago
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Why reinvent google forms?
  • presentation 6y ago
    You can say that about any app though, everything kinda can be boiled down to a spreadsheet lol. This does probably have complex requirements, not saying it’s not egregious but this comment is facetious.
• endisneigh 6y ago
  It’s also amazing to me how much a custom skin of Django Admin costs. Has there been any research into what needs to happen to align government administrators incentives with the population? So much waste - why isn’t the government forcing Deloitte to fix? I have no familiarity with government contracts, but as far as I know with Big Tech contracts they’re definitely written to favor the Big Tech company in these types of scenarios. The government should take a page from that playbook.
  • throwaway3699 6y ago
    Cutting taxes to half might force these guys to become more competitive. I don't see any incentives for the government to give up (I'm sure this benefits their friends at these firms) until forced to make hard decisions.
• adultSwim 6y ago
  Is that a lot for a website?
  • klyrs 6y ago
    I made about a dozen websites in the late 90s and early aughts... most I ever made at it was 50k/y. OTOH, they worked and continued to work long past my involvement. Maybe it's a fair price for a shoddy website?
    • hogFeast 6y ago
      With these projects, there are Veblen effects. No-one wants the $50k/year consultant who quietly cranks out good work...they want the $300k/year consultants whose work may or may not be good but they can spin, make things easy with your boss, etc. ...stuff like this drives me mad. You see it everywhere. I worked in financial services, and (on my weaker days) it was enraging to see someone pay three or four times the price to get a product that was not only bad, it was literally worthless...life is weird.
    • cm2187 6y ago
      Modern websites are designed to blow up as soon as there isn't an active development team anymore. The docker image needs to be rebuilt from source, the cloud APIs get deprecated, etc.
      • lazyjeff 6y ago
        Yes, that's a good way to put it. I've been campaigning against this trend for a while in any project I'm involved in [https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/ https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/]. The toolchain is simply bloated, and pieces brittle. Many of the projects out there would not last past an OS upgrade.
• didibus 6y ago
  I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?
  • known 6y ago
    This issue/corruption is addressed in https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015 https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015
  • scythe 6y ago
    >At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. You can, but the government has to jump through a lot of hoops. Even government contractors have to jump through a lot of hoops. Sometimes there are regulations affecting the hiring process even for government contractors, e.g. drug tests, citizenship requirements, background checks, location requirements, etc. Every relevant law named after a sympathetic child adds $5B to development costs. And so forth.
  • tyingq 6y ago
    Deloitte billable rates for the higher end folks are $350-700/hour. Scapegoat as a service isn't cheap.
  • BoorishBears 6y ago
    I have no doubt the government got scammed, but often these estimates provision for things like ensuring phone support is available any time the website is up for accessibility requirements. That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis
    • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
      > That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis I’ve always wondered why this was the case. But surely inconveniencing the majority instead of making it more convenient for the minority is a step in the wrong direction. Whatever. Off topic...
• lmilcin 6y ago
  I have worked with Deloitte on two projects (on clients' side, I would never willingly work for Deloitte). Generally expect them to do absolute minimum necessary to meet the contract. The code was obfuscated to ensure support contract. The people employed to write it were not interested in the quality in the slightest but were interested a lot in specifics of the contract.
  • brundolf 6y ago
    Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?
    • et-al 6y ago
      There's 18F for the US government, but unfortunately they're limited by government salary caps and other policies.
    • offtop5 6y ago
      For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-employees-hit-the-federal-pay-ceiling-in-2020/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e... >But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year. And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector. Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.
      • brundolf 6y ago
        That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
• leephillips 6y ago
  I could have made a broken website for less than half of that.
• EduardLev 6y ago
  Good article. I thought this line from the article was interesting: > Online sign-ups are especially challenging for older people, perhaps the worst group to beta-test a new system. I think I understand the author's intent when saying "worst group", but in this case I can't imagine a better group. They're literally the first people who will need to be using this system! If you beta-test your product with the people who will be able to use it despite all of its flaws, is that really testing? Anyway yeah, just upset at this comment given that I have family members struggling with all this vaccine appointment software.
  • presentation 6y ago
    Worst in the sense that older people often are unfamiliar with computers at all - perhaps that group should have robust options that don’t come in the form of a web app if many have never even used a computer before.
• asdf333 6y ago
  what an embarrassment.
  • bitcharmer 6y ago
    Sadly this is the norm among big consultancies.
• alsoc 6y ago
  If we draw UML diagrams the software will be better, oh wait before we draw the diagrams we can make a project plan and present how long each stage will take and how many resources are needed to draw those diagrams. Ok that comes out to about $44M
• johnthuss 6y ago
  My favorite part was this quote: “It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome.” As if that is a serious problem.
  • hitpointdrew 6y ago
    It is if your target audience is 70+ year olds.
  • presentation 6y ago
    It is if you’re working in government or other fields like medicine, where a ton of both legacy and new software is still being written with IE as the target, that have prevented people from moving off it.
  • Pasorrijer 6y ago
    Also a problem if you're working with airlines, medium to large companies over 15 years old, the government, etc. Etc. Comments like these are why the people who have to interface with actual customers get so mad with development teams.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    It is a very serious problem when you are the Government and you need your site to work for everyone. Also, fuck Google's monopoly. (I'm a long-time IE user.)
  • notapenny 6y ago
    According to the login page for the system it works in FF, Safari and Edge as well. I suppose "only Chrome" is more accurately "if it works in Chrome, it'll run in everything but IE". Still makes me wonder why though, most projects I've worked on have have to support IE, and though it annoys developers because they cannot use the hotHewThingN api, mostly its fine.
• yalogin 6y ago
  This kind of looting is common place and is built into the federal contracting situation. After this 48 million or so they will get more to ix the bugs and maintain it. The maintenance is the most lucrative aspect of the contract. Unfortunately this corrupt behavior is deeply rooted and condoned and expected and there doesn't seem to be much motivation to come up with a solution. Wonder why the government doesn't just staff up a tech wing themselves instead of outsourcing. There is so much to do and its much more efficient to just create an tech department that serves all branches of government.
  • antipaul 6y ago
    But then that tech department would become government itself, and would that be better? Maybe, maybe not. Though rare, there _are_ private success stories, such as healthcare.gov 2.0 [1] and Palantir, though the latter gets in hot water for some tangential reasons. But maybe figure out how these happened, and scale that. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...
    • estaseuropano 6y ago
      But healthcare.gov was a private sector disaster and then fixed through a gov-internal startup-like tech team.
  • oivey 6y ago
    But you see, something something, core business government isn’t tech, something something, private contractors are more efficient.
• NearAP 6y ago
  After reading the article, I think it boils down to a) Poor/lack of understanding of who the actual users are e.g. these are systems that will be used by both the young and old people, especially older people in the early stages since they are the ones at the front of the vaccine line; worst case, the system should have been optimized for them. b) bullet a then leads to poor requirements e.g. given that most libraries are shut down (lots of elderly people get help with online stuff at community centers/libraries), requirements should have included less rigidity (on errors) or a module that is fun and friendly that walks people through it, system should be designed with 'plain' mobile first in mind, and account for a person being both a patient and an admin, etc
  • presentation 6y ago
    It’s hard to know what actually went wrong without being in the project itself - there’s probably organizational issues within Deloitte and bad incentives around the entire procurement process, but hard to know from the outside just seeing that it’s a disaster.
• mikesabbagh 6y ago
  Companies like deloitte sees the CDC as a big cow that needs milking. They will never finish the job. It is like going to the hospital and tell the doctor I have a great insurance. The Doctors will do every possible procedure. It is better to check. CDC needs to employ developers and do the job internally.
• corytheboyd 6y ago
  Hey CDC, I’ll build your website for half that price. By myself. And it will work. Just uh, hit me up haha It’s insane how far those unfamiliar with software will take the mythical man month. Nonono throwing money and people at your problem is absolutely not guaranteed to solve it better. My offer is of course a joke, well unless they want to talk specifics and I agree it’s reasonable to take on myself. Or just plain reasonable.
  • xyst 6y ago
    are you also going to answer the phone calls and e-mails of thousands (potentially millions) of technology illiterate users?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • corytheboyd 6y ago
      I mean with $22M on the line I’m willing to at least investigate a means of doing so.
      • smabie 6y ago
        I actually think Cory the boyd could probably figure it out.
        • corytheboyd 6y ago
          Lol thank you for your blind faith :p
• xyst 6y ago
  should have hired the bois at palantir to build the system (I am invested in PLTR)
• singingfish 6y ago
  OK, so the fundamental problem with health IT is a greater problem in the commercial software industry as a whole. The buyer tends not to be the person who uses the software, and the more bureaucratic/ technocratic the process you use to get to the end user the more likely you are to not meet their needs. Put crudely and inaccurately, the procurement team end up going with the consultants who do a good game of golf. Add government and a big consulting firm like Deloitte in health IT, and you'll be ready for a world of pain. Here [0] is a good paper on the topic. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22188347/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22188347/
• anewlanguage 6y ago
  Can anyone actually load the website (https://vams.cdc.gov https://vams.cdc.gov)? I get a "too many redirects" error, which is quite a bit worse than "the buttons are poorly placed".
  • 8192kjshad09- 6y ago
    It seems to redirect to https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/ https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/ which redirects to https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/ https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/ which redirects back to https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/ https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/ for an infinite redirect loop. Wonder if anyone will pay me $44M to set up a redirect loop?
• billions 6y ago
  The last time the US government made something to be proud of was 50 years ago with the Apollo program. Counter examples welcome!
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    The Hubble Space Telescope? (and the other "Great Observatories" satellites)
    • billions 6y ago
      Hubble was funded in the 1970s with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the 1986 Challenger disaster. It was finally launched by Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, but its main mirror had been ground incorrectly, resulting in spherical aberration that compromised the telescope's capabilities. The optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993. Meh.
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        “Figured out on-orbit repair and upgrade of a school bus sized telescope” sounds pretty cool to me.
  • damon_c 6y ago
    TCP/IP is pretty awesome. How about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite To be fair... it's also from about 50 years ago. Hmm...
  • damon_c 6y ago
    Ugh... The GPS project was started by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1973...
• Proven 6y ago
  ObamaCare portal v2. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help..." Startups develop a vaccine with $40 mil. Governments can't build a web site.
• hbcondo714 6y ago
  Reminds me of the discussion here a couple years ago when Accenture was sued over their website redesign for Hertz rental cars: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070
• nickthemagicman 6y ago
  This makes me so upset. I'm currently also at a federal research institution thats millions of dollars over budget and years behind on a software project, and there is NO PRESSURE on the management because federal grant money printer go brrrr. If time is money, this is peoples lives. Who holds these people accountable?
• lxe 6y ago
  Why hasn't any politician taken up a stance against bloated contracts like these? I think it's a cause that lots of folks could get behind.
  • aweiland 6y ago
    Because the companies that get these contracts pay for the politician's war chest.
    • 0xcde4c3db 6y ago
      Not to mention employ the politician's constituents. I don't know if it's ever been conclusively proven, but it's been alleged for decades that the major defense contractors deliberately structure their big projects into subcontracts that can employ people in as many Congressional districts as possible. There are allegedly people in 300+ districts working on the F-35 program, for example.
      • aweiland 6y ago
        Oh absolutely. Boeing "subcontracts" out tons of what they do to as many states as possible. Each state == 2 senators that are worried about "jobs". Turns out in the long run it's cheaper to ship pieces around the country than "lobby" just 2 senators from Washington.
• zaroth 6y ago
  > Deloitte is the only contractor that can meet the project requirements, because configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform. Therefore, no other contractor has rights or access to leverage the system to carry out O&M activities, such as the administration of the system, change and defect management and end user support. As the only contractor with the GovConnect proprietary platform, and the need to stand up O&M support for VAMS while concurrently developing future releases, Deloitte is the only contractor that can achieve the O&M scope and contract requirements.” Can’t make this stuff up. https://beta.sam.gov/opp/2f5fc512fdde4e22860832337aac420f/view#general https://beta.sam.gov/opp/2f5fc512fdde4e22860832337aac420f/vi...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • satya71 6y ago
    Holy cow! Talk about vendor lock-in! Even AWS is easier to get out of.
  • faramarz 6y ago
    Wow! the next article should be about who signed that contract!
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • animex 6y ago
    US Digital Service Assemble!
    • JoBrad 6y ago
      Exactly. We need someone to “Amazon” the shit out of our governmental computing systems (e.g. APIs everywhere), especially those designed to interact with other systems. They should be required to use an accessible API with published schemas and documentation. I’m surprised someone hasn’t identified this as a stability and security risk for our government.
• billions 6y ago
  When doing a home remodel and the contractor breaks something they either return the money or fix it. Blame the CDC for not vetting the work and enforcing contracts.
• tormeh 6y ago
  Germany also has its own controversy about corona software. The government wants to standardize on SORMAS, but many local governments don't want to switch. I expected a dump, but to be honest, SORMAS looks pretty good. It's already in use by Nigeria and Ghana, and it's on Github. It's Java EE with Postgres on Ubuntu, so safe and sane tech choices. They even have a play version: https://sormas.helmholtz-hzi.de/sormas-ui/login https://sormas.helmholtz-hzi.de/sormas-ui/login that also looks ok. I'm thoroughly impressed.
• ex-deloitte 6y ago
  Any insiders know the technology behind VAMS? I wonder if it is built on their ‘exalink’ platform? I’m no longer with Deloitte, but I saw that they recently sold off their life sciences department to their only competitor- Model N [1]. The Exalink platform was born out of work being done for the life sciences department. I thought it was an interesting development that Deloitte sold them off since when I was still there it was being peddled as this great in-house cloud-agnostic system that could do whatever you wanted it to do (spoiler: it couldn’t). Anyways, maybe it is completely unrelated? 1: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/model-n-modn-acquires-deloittes-unit-to-expand-in-life-sciences-2021-01-05 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/model-n-modn-acquires-deloit...
• schnable 6y ago
  > “The health-care software industry is enormous, and it exists largely because it’s privatized, it’s not standardized,” says Stone. “There are a lot of free-market inefficiencies. And the country doesn’t have a public health infrastructure, so there isn’t any real drive to fix it.” > “You think about the industries that have been transformed by technology—someone said, How do we get a pizza to your house faster? That’s a competitive advantage,” he says. “That has not happened in American health care.” The pizza industry is not a exactly standardized industry with public infrastructure either... the failure of VAMS (and healthcare.gov before it, and the unemployment systems, etc) shows that single government solution is not a fix for broken procurement and project management.
  • estaseuropano 6y ago
    Healthcare.gov was a private sector disaster that then was fixed through a government-internal 'startup'.
• starik36 6y ago
  The ridiculous expense of software in the health system is endemic. It’s a shame it’s been allowed to go on for so long. A write up on why it’s so expensive from a standpoint of a developer. https://maxwelljordan.medium.com/why-healthcare-in-us-is-so-expensive-from-the-perspective-of-a-software-developer-45bc5db72e34 https://maxwelljordan.medium.com/why-healthcare-in-us-is-so-...
• bit_logic 6y ago
  Does anyone know if this was yet another React website disaster? This is exactly the kind of website that should be built with reliable technologies. You don't need fancy animations or whatever junk the SPA style sites have. Just old style server side frameworks, minimal Javascript, standards supported HTML and CSS. The article mentioned Internet Explorer as an issue? Cross browser support is no issue if you stick to the old standard HTML and CSS and minimize use of Javascript. Mobile support? That's just loading the right CSS library. The goal here isn't "engagement" and all the other shit SPA style sites optimize for with their heavy JS tracking and advertisement code that makes the laptop fan run. The goal here is a simple reliable CRUD website for scheduling appointments, the previous generation of web development tech stack is perfect for this.
  • duxup 6y ago
    Usually these big debacles have more to do with the back end, integration of legacy systems, and etc than front end frameworks / choices.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    No kidding --- the fact that they mentioned it only worked in Chrome is a sad commentary of the state of the Internet and what Google's effective monopoly has lead to.
    • info781 6y ago
      We had to live with sites than only ran in IE for years.
• GizmoSwan 6y ago
  Not surprising to me. It was probably contracted out to multiple subcontractors with heavy top down design and review process. Each module is reviewed but the reviews can not locate the bugs. Sometimes they hire junior programmers who would have the latest stuff in their resumes but the kids are into copying and pasting stuff from internet not knowing exactly what the code does and they don't have enough experience producing clean and bug free code themselves. Other times the top/down design produces code that lacks elegance and resembles what truck drivers would produce with too many people working on it and no one responsible for the whole thing. Have seen that before. Not sure about this case.
• amluto 6y ago
  I find myself wondering why much technology is needed. If I were running a mass vaccination campaign, I would approach it like this: First, I would create extremely fine grained but easy to check eligibility tiers. Going by date of birth would be the most basic solution. At any given time, vaccinations are open to people born on or before a given date. [0] Then, I would set up real mass vaccination sites. None of this almost-all-vaccines-come-from-big-medical providers nonsense we have in most of California. The CA scheme is fundamentally inequitable -- I got an email from a medical system that told me that they would email me when it was my turn if I had seen a primary care provider in the last three years or had two specialist appointments in the last three years. This fundamentally discriminates against people without adequate insurance who haven't seen a doctor in a major medical system recently. Mass vaccination sites would be open to anyone with a date of birth <= one threshold on a walk/drive-in basis with no appointment and with a different threshold for appointments. Optionally there would be another threshold for people who want to hang around and see if they can get an extra shot at the end of the day. I would adjust the thresholds as needed to keep occupancy at the level I want it. This requires minimal IT infrastructure. I would let major clinics administer vaccines with whatever appointment system they want, with some rules. First, the clinics may only vaccinate people who have been eligible at the mass vaccination sites for some amount of time, say two weeks. So if you want your chance first, you go to a mass vaccination site -- clinics are just for convenience. Second, the clinics only get more vaccines when they are administering an adequate amount of the vaccines they have already received. I would track people who have been vaccinated with a database with no integrity constraints whatsoever. Each site submits a trivial machine readable form with a list of people they have vaccinated. This list gets imported to a database. Dealing with all the inevitable issues is not permitted to block actually giving vaccines. [1] Finally, everyone who gets their first dose gets a printed (or hand-written!) card with the date of their next vaccine and a reference number that can be used to look up the card in the database. This reference number is (date, site, line at site, sequence number) -- these are supposed to match up with the end-of-day logs, but they require no central coordination. [2] If you have a card for a second shot, it is valid at any site once it's the right time. Damnit, this whole scheme could be done entirely without computers, and that's how it should be. It doesn't even need two-way communication -- there could literally be a section of the newspaper saying "if you were born before m/d/y, come to Dodger Stadium or Levi Field or ... and get your vaccine, no appointment needed. If you were born before m2/d2/y2, you may call this number of visit this website to make an appointment." If the whole IT infrastructure goes down, then it will be annoying but everything will continue to work. [0] There are many possible improvements, but they should be kept simple. For example, people born on or before a given date or people with a doctor's note explaining that they have some risk factor. [1] Pay some contract development firm to develop a nice app that scans an ID card, does all the data entry, and prints out a receipt. The app has one primary requirement: it does not print a receipt until the server acknowledges receipt of the request and commits the transaction. But make sure that, even if the app fails completely, everyone at the clinic knows how to use a piece of paper and a pen to do the same job. Or a laptop running Excel or LibreOffice -- there is no shortage of laptops around. Or a Google Sheet, etc. [2] Of course you can cheat, but most people won't. And the logs will mostly reveal the cheaters.
• j45 6y ago
  This is what happens when accounting firms, or worse management consulting firms trying to be in technology. When those groups talk about innovation and disruption, I often run. The next time your government awards a tech project to tech illiterate smooth talkers, keep this in the back pocket.
• justinzollars 6y ago
  > abandoned due to bugs That can be translated into a new corrupt administration is replacing the old corrupt administration and will spend an additional 44 million on a new website built by their own politically connected friends.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  I would check out https://pedestrianobservations.com/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/ for information on other but analogous cost disease. Basically, no, it's not just a meme. American managerial culture (or even Anglosphere at large, as alleged there) really does suck. And no amount of crafty mechanism design gets around the fact that least exploitable system seems to be one where the civil service isn't maimed and the work is done in-house. Basically government should fund some free software for various general purposes (or just do a decent UBI), and then any "consulting" should basically be public sector and free software sector exchanging best practices. The higher end academic consulting (ARPA) is legit[1] and should still exist, but it shouldn't be defense specific, and like drug bounties basically should exist to smooth over the "research...development...product" gap --- development is severely sort-changed current since outside of DARPA and ARPA-E so much research that doesn't contribute to someone's rent-seeking agenda just lies wasted. [1]: I suppose should say I once was an intern at https://galois.com/ https://galois.com/
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  this happened to smaller/mid size company as well. a long time ago i work for a mid size company with a small division that sell specialized software build with Delphi. its a desktop app. when i got hired by the company, they outsourced it to Capgemini. after 3 years, they still can't get the app convert to .Net. (that's the goal) by the time i got out the company. they changed to another more local company instead of big outsource firm like Capgemini. they still haven't got it all work out and the new company they hired throw away all the code done by Capgemini. the whole project was estimate to be 2 million by Capgemini.
• S_A_P 6y ago
  In my field (ETRM) I’ve worked with Deloitte on a couple of occasions. I have seen this sort of nonsense on more than one occasion. A specific example that comes to mind was a project a few years back where Deloitte stuck 4 junior consultants along with 5 senior consultants and spent a couple million dollars for 12 months and were unable to produce even one business scenario in the system of choice. They did however produce reams of documents showing how it should work. The software vendor was called back onsite and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. A team of 3 of us ended up doing full implementation in 5 months. That included about 20 scenarios from front to back office along with foreign business.
• moron4hire 6y ago
  The problem with Deloitte is that it's massive and organized as a partnership. A massive company requires several layers of management to be able to organize, and a partnership expects billable hours out of everyone. So you have this massive, sickly, distended torso of middle-management whose only purpose in life is to recieve decrees from on high and push the thumb down on the people doing the actual work. And the only way they keep their jobs is to figure out how to stick their hours on the client's bill. So you quickly see large numbers of leads, directors, managing directors, managing partners, and partners show up into meetings with 1 or 2 SMEs to make a show of "managing the project", whose only purpose in life is to suck the oxygen out of the room. And I mean literally suck the oxygen out of a room. The meeting rooms are tiny--cuz real estate isn't billable!--so when you get more people than chairs in a room like that, the CO2 levels literally start to put you to sleep. I spent a year and a half at Deloitte, building Augmented Reality projects. Every single project I worked, I was only brought in during the last 10% of the project time. The time was always not enough to do a good job. The one project that I cared about--incidentally also the only one that got any traction with any actual clients--got canned during a restructuring from working within Deloitte's "government" division to it's "industry" division. Except we always worked blended across industries and the app was targeted at industry, not gov. To this day, I really think the entire point was to just waste money, and my app getting traction edged too dangerously close to one day having to show efficacy. I'm now the head of VR (yeah, I never actually wanted to do AR, and didn't even get hired for it, but that's where Deloitte stuck me) at a small company that does foreign language instruction for gov. A year and a half in and we've got an exciting project that has tested well with some limited number of students and is soon deploying company-wide. Barring some natural disaster, I'm extremely happy to never change jobs again.
• alexpetralia 6y ago
  At some point, someone should compile a bullet point list of all these consulting train wrecks on a simple website, like www.consultingfails.com. Then, whenever you hear another multi-million dollar catastrophe, add it to the list. The brand damage will accrue - as it should - over time.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    IBM has a long list. Doesn't matter.
• seshagiric 6y ago
  Consulting can be a boon or a curse. This case it was a government client, and one could argue there is no singular point of authority/ responsibility that may have caught on to the troubles early on. However I have also it happen in private companies where 350-500$/hr 'consultants't do not provide anything more than code lifted from code samples or community tech forums.
• GizmoSwan 6y ago
  They should have funded it using Gamestop stock. Fraction of fraction of its one day gain would have paid for it.
• victor106 6y ago
  This makes you realize the state of IT in 2021. Humanity can make an mRNA vaccine in 6 months. That's literally (almost) instructing your cells to make a particular protein. But one of the largest consulting company in the world cannot develop a freaking website.
• codpiece 6y ago
  Maybe it's me, but I was quite happy with my VAMS experience. CDC notified me by email that I was eligible. My data was pre-populated. Signed up for an appointment quickly and got messages reminding me of appointment. Considering that this came out of nowhere, I was impressed how quickly and easily I got a vaccine. Big thanks to the Army who ran the vaccination site.
• rainyMammoth 6y ago
  I have worked with Deloitte type consultant in the past. It was exactly what I was expecting. A couple 20-something dressed up in suits, really good at talking and bullshitting high level visions. Very little technical knowledge overall. It was a disaster.
• throwarayes 6y ago
  Having seen Federal Govt contracting it’s easy to see how this works. And it’s a 2 way street of dysfunction: - Many fed agencies have little tech savvy or ability to evaluate solutions - Feds can have complex, mandated processes for software procurement, development and deployment that must be followed. This drives up the cost and limits the companies that choose to bid. - There’s not much of a “get sh*t done” attitude. There’s little consequence for the individuals that managed a failure on both sides. Usually “oh well, another day at the office!” is the norm for many federal agencies/contractors. - buzzword chasing tech ignorant administrators that consulting firms readily take advantage of - “yes! But does it have machine learning!?” - there’s many fiefs at these agencies that must be navigated: “Oh! Wow - you spent 6 months building and it’s time to deploy? The security team really hates CYZ tech and we’ll have to escalate this to the director” - so many g-d stakeholder to please and woo: from managers to administrators to political appointees and congresspeople. The relationship cost can be staggering. These stereotypes aren’t always the case - some govt groups can actually execute really well. But many of these points dominate sadly.
  • joncrane 6y ago
    >Wow - you spent 6 months building and it’s time to deploy? The security team really hates CYZ tech and we’ll have to escalate this to the director This right here! The "cyber" folks always throw a wrench in the works at the last moment. They rule by FUD and also have literally ZERO idea how stuff works. There's an old saying about teaching, but these days, and especially in government contracting, it applies to "cybersecurity." "Those who can, do. Those who can't go into security."
• kangarooglacier 6y ago
  It's easy to bash poor work by Deloitte (rightfully so), but this reflects decades of poor decisions by the Federal government. The number of Federal employees has remained constant for 30 years so that politicians can claim the Federal government isn't expanding; but the budget has ballooned. The balance all goes to contractors. They need Deloitte because they have lost the capability to do anything themselves. To make a sweeping generalization which doesn't give enough credit to some amazing groups, the Federal government does not have people who are capable of managing complex IT projects. The government has outsourced so much work that it no longer has personnel who are capable of knowing what is going on. Federal workers are competent in managing contracts, but not actual work. So when you arrive at a new and complex project (like widely distributing a vaccine for an unforeseen global pandemic), they don't know what to do. How do you write that in a contract and enforce it? That doesn't even begin to get in to the requirements around what it takes to launch a production IT system while meeting government cyber security requirements/processes. A lot of comments here are lamenting how easy this is. Let me set it straight: you cannot launch a random Django/Rails MVP in the government. They don’t operate that way, for reasons good and bad. The fact that Deloitte had something in production in under a year, no matter how buggy, is a minor miracle.
• mherrmann 6y ago
  I just experienced something similar with Accenture. They were hired by the state of Bavaria in Germany to build an appointment management system for Covid vaccines. They didn't get it done in time and then it sucked so badly that the doctors didn't want to use it. They now use my tiny little business's [1] solution instead. I've been on the market since 2014 and they found me through my web site. They called on a Friday "we need the system on Monday". Signed the contract in the evening, set everything up over the weekend, and now they're loving it. Sometimes, I think these big organizations are just so overloaded with bureaucracy and politics that a little guy like me can compete on pure product quality. [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/terminerinnerung-56e9d0105b https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/terminerinnerung-56e9...
• eigenvector 6y ago
  The Canadian government paid Deloitte $16M for exactly the same thing, with a deadline of January 31 to get it running. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-gives-accounting-firm-deloitte-16m-contract-to-track-covid-19-vaccinations-1.5262030 https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-gives-accounting-firm... One of the factors cited in awarding the contract was Deloitte's "experience" doing the same thing in the USA. http://www.canadian-accountant.com/content/business/why-deloitte-canada-won-ottawa-s-lucrative-vaccine-platform-contract http://www.canadian-accountant.com/content/business/why-delo...
• pts_ 6y ago
  Knew a guy who joined Deloitte. Was called star performer when he was focused on beating others down instead of the work at hand. You hire careerists, you get wall street brokers for every job, including existentially challenging ones.
• odyssey7 6y ago
  A $44M scapegoat service?
• throw7 6y ago
  "It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome." Sometimes I wonder if flat earthers are right... we indeed live in clown world. A sucker born every minute.
• jandrewrogers 6y ago
  I’ve done a lot of work for multiple national governments on multiple projects. There are two facts that can be true at the same time: - The government often grotesquely overpays for mediocre product delivered by vendors without holding them accountable in a meaningful way - The government process drives up costs to an insane level independent of implementor good faith efforts and strongly selects for companies good at the process rather than execution These are two different problems, and both of them manifest with any large contract. I would make the observation that it is easier to hide mediocre product and execution when you can hide behind a grotesquely inefficient and mediocre government process. What transpired here should never happen. But I know why and how it happened.
  • pulse7 6y ago
    IBM was always good at understanding these "government processes", while Apple always struggled with them... and kept up with what they understand very good: consumer buying/selection processes... :-)
• jpxk 6y ago
  I just started reading 'Skin in the Game' by Nassim Taleb. These kind of overpriced consulting contracts, where nobody in particular bears the downside risk of incompetence, fit into his framework well. Hiring Deloitte et al usually amounts to outsourcing responsibility, except the people who do the work also bear little or no long-term responsibility if things go bad. A 3-person startup, on the other hand, suffers from severe downside (at least in a business sense) if they mess something like this up.
• Raymondfx 6y ago
  Agile vs Waterfall Score 10 - 0
• paulie_a 6y ago
  Why does the government contract with deloitte? They seem to suck at everything they do
• jspaetzel 6y ago
  The worst part of all of this is that the CDC didn't already have this type of tool in place, years ago, before a pandemic even hit. This is the type of basic thing they should have already in place without any new spending. It doesn't even need to sit around unused. They should be using it every year for flu shot distribution or coordinating other types of vaccines which are normally in abundant supply.
• thomasfl 6y ago
  25 years ago, websites like this was seen as something of a novelty. They were made just as much as an experiment as something necessary. As a young web developer at that time, I often had to do all the programming, ux design and graphic design myself. There wasn`t any budget for more people. Full stack development wasn`t a thing yet. I still get amazed by how well staffed and funded web development projects have become. Web development has become more complicated too. More animations, accessability and higher security all adds up to making the whole project being more time consuming.
• j_barbossa 6y ago
  > The contracts claim the company was the only “responsible source” to build the tool. Looks like the CEO of Deloitte and the director of CDC played a few rounds of golf together before...
• peter_retief 6y ago
  I am very cynically about large sw development projects. They are very political, people who do well are "well connected" The client wants to mitigate the risk so falls into the trap of legal and technology word salad served up by the vendor. The actual work is often done by junior developers who dont have the experience to spot potential failures or often too scared to point out system flaws. One could write a book on the failures of these big projects, would make depressing reading though.
• mns06 6y ago
  Does anyone know what the system architecture actually is?
• habosa 6y ago
  Deloitte's habits of stealing tens of millions of dollars to deliver broken technology to the government are so deeply ingrained they couldn't even stop themselves from taking this critical assignment. People are going to die because of this, there's no way around that.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  I will install wordpress for them for $43M
• varispeed 6y ago
  These big contracting companies ganged up in the UK and persuaded the government to change the law so that small independent contractors are no longer competitive (for example they essentially cannot deduct any business costs and have to draw entire contract revenue as salary, that means no funding of other business avenues) and at the current rates such contractors have to pay over 50% in tax, whereas companies like Deloitte not only don't have such costs, they can also hire such contractors as employees without rights. It's a scandal that is going to blow up later this year when the law goes live in April. Similar measures were already introduced in public sector, which caused mass exodus of small firms.
• williesleg 6y ago
  H1b's again no doubt. Do the needful.
• mkl95 6y ago
  Deloitte is well known among devs in my country for the poor working conditions of their employees (including unpaid overtime and low pay) and the overpriced contracts they sign with public bodies. They do things like charging €2M to build a broken CRUD app written by devs fresh out of uni. They then follow up with a "maintenance contract" that consists of not doing much to fix it at all, and replacing the people who are not fresh out of uni anymore with cheaper devs.
• p0d 6y ago
  Ok government, give Deloitte the contract in a crisis. Pay them a year after they deliver. They are not short of money. Penalise them for not delivering. Or alternatively spend a few billion making the government more business savy. It will probably save you money. Then again maybe not. That will be another few billion going to Deloitte.
• rmason 6y ago
  If I was to guess the CDC wrote poor specs. Probably never talked at length to a variety of different county health departments to understand their needs. Never had a persona written so they didn't understand the need for IE or that people might be using it on a mobile phone. Deloitte just coded the spec, cashed their check and walked away. Deloitte probably outsourced development overseas. I know some smaller government contractors in the D.C area who would have done it for a third as much and done some of the CDC's work for them when they saw that it wasn't done.
  • bitcharmer 6y ago
    No. Big consultancies are hired to - among other things - capture the requirements (simply because many of their clients don't know how to do it properly). But they intentionally do it in a form that lets them over-charge and under-deliver. Seen it too many times.
• AdrianB1 6y ago
  I have 2 close friends that work or were working there. One was an application key user in a different company, he was hired as a deployment manager for that app for more than double the pay; I am happy for him, but he knows he is not a manager. The other one was hired on a position, asked to do something completely different he was not qualified for, the work hours were around 70-80 per week (no overtime paid), zero management implication so he left after a few months. They went in panic mode, offered him double the pay and less work hours, he refused to stay there so they become aggressive. They use to pay above the market for whatever they can hire, but the chaos inside is making any competent people leave asap, so they pay a lot to retain whatever they can, not the experts. It is just a bubble with nothing than hot air inside.
• codecamper 6y ago
  I am working on something now. Almost ready. I wrote the very first Taxi app on the iPhone ages ago. And Scanner911.
• may4m 6y ago
  Deloitte was part of the destruction of South Africa's state energy company
• zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  The classic “Must have caught ten pound trout in Colorado river during August 1984” method. Deloitte’s name seems to come up a lot when there is a multi-dozen million dollar web site that is falling over. I wonder if it was a former Deloitte person who wrote the Parler backend because it seems to be the same sort of massive footprint that falls over when the wind blows type setup.
  • achow 6y ago
    ‘We are very sorry’: Deloitte apologizes to RI about UHIP (Unified Health Infrastructure Project) https://www.wpri.com/target-12/we-are-very-sorry-deloitte-apologizes-to-ri-about-uhip/ https://www.wpri.com/target-12/we-are-very-sorry-deloitte-ap...
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Government contractor cynicism is one of the saddest games plaguing the modern world. It literally guarantees the inability of governments to have decent, working technology. IDK what the structural solution to this is, but it is horrible that Deloitte will walk away from this unscathed. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any financial incentive for them to deliver usable software. Imagine screwing over a client that does this much business with you.
• christophilus 6y ago
  The government really needs to start insourcing its IT. I worked briefly as a contractor, caught a glimpse of how the sausage was made, and left within a month or two. I’ll never do it again. I can’t imagine insourcing producing worse outcomes, and the end result would probably be less costly, even if it was still low quality.
• consultSKI 6y ago
  It’s called Payola.
• cromwellian 6y ago
  Beltway Bandits win again. Literally the worse kind of grift and project paralysis. I worked on government contracts in the 90s, and the process is so full of grifters and people over billing, companies selling software licenses far above market rate with supposed levels of support and reliability that are actually no better, or worse, that I wouldn’t recommend anyone work in that sector. Oh and all of this talk about 95% of the work being understanding the problem or integrating with legacy government systems, gimme a break. Every time I’ve seen someone purport to integrate with existing government systems it’s always been a buggy disaster and hideous from the user perspective. This is the same kind of rot that infects a lot of enterprise software. Addiction to hyper complexity, too many layers, too many points of failure. Just how complicated does a vaccine management system need to be? If you’re adding more and more requirements, it’s not software that’s the problem, it’s the requirements that the vaccine distribution is being made more complicated than it is needs to be. I think at this point, a random distribution would be more effective than the complicated rollout they’re trying.
• js2 6y ago
  I thought we have 18F and USDS to avoid this sort of situation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11... Various discussions over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=healthcare.gov https://hn.algolia.com/?q=healthcare.gov
• wheaties 6y ago
  "it only works in Chrome" Thanks, I hate it. I use Firefox. This 50% of my time on the internet.
• info781 6y ago
  These big companies always have a lot of overhead. The middle layers of management are useless. Often the government will try to work with smaller companies that are under 50 people. However, if these small companies land good contracts the big companies will buy them up.
• sfc32 6y ago
  What's it written in?
• 1cvmask 6y ago
  Reminds me of when Hertz sued Accenture for a website that failed after spending $32 million on it: https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsu...
• temporallobe 6y ago
  This is not atypical for US government projects. In 2012 I was brought in to “rescue” the UI for a huge multi-contractor system that was supposed to replace an aging legacy system written 40+ years ago. I worked with the architect tirelessly for almost 3 years, trying to implement various changes but at its core the new system was highly flawed and suffered from various team changes and reboots. The UI/UX “expert” was not a developer and had very little technical background, and was therefore unfamiliar with basic HTML and CSS concepts. For some reason they let end-users dictate style and behavior aspects of the application. For example, the legacy system consisted of green-screen terminals and all the associated keystrokes (think ancient POS systems you still see in some retail stores). The vocal minority of these end-users demanded that we replicate this interface exactly instead of building it from the ground up as a modern best-practices UI using the latest web idioms and paradigms. It gets worse. At some point someone important said Javascript is evil, and we were to avoid using it as much as possible, despite the application using several embedded and third-party Javascript libraries. I ended up leaving that project for a slightly less insane one, but the pay was good. Anyway, I heard about a year later that the entire project (a 10-year effort that cost tens of millions of dollars) was abandoned. They continued using their greenscreens but I heard they hired a company to build an interface that reads these screens and presents a modern HTML facade over there screens that operates them kinda like a proxy. You can’t make this stuff up.
  • curtis3389 6y ago
    I tend to side with that vocal minority on UI design. I remember watching my friend who was a manager at a Domino's back in the day place an order for a pizza with their old POS system that was driven by key strokes, and it was ridiculously fast and easy. A pizza was a list of characters that described it. Fast forward a decade, and I was tapping away at a touch-screen POS system for a smaller pizza chain, and it was woefully slow in comparison for even the most basic pizzas, and more error prone because Anchovies and Artichokes were right beside each other. If you ever have a user-base where time=money, they will want hotkeys for everything.
• TruffleLabs 6y ago
  Sadly, the Mac SE pictured in the article is being drug through all this ;)
• nojvek 6y ago
  It baffles me how bad non-SaaS software tends to be. Software written for non-tech folks. We have a 100 shiny JIRA clones but some niche software for nurses has awful and slow UX. Everytime I’ve gone to a doctor, they’re using a different kind of software portal. Many claim its an expensive software the hospital bought but doesn’t do what they want so they write things on paper instead. This is one of my fears as a dev. I have dev problems that I know how to fix but I’m blind to the universe of other problems that I could potentially fix and deliver huge value. I’d really love to learn more about other people’s niche problems that can be solved by software.
• diogenescynic 6y ago
  Deloitte is a horrible consulting company. They designed an awful financial system implementation at the company I worked at and we just kept giving them more money and they kept bringing in more entry-level consultants. They even billed us multiple times for work we did ourselves... I thought it was also shady that one of our department heads was married to the Deloitte partner who led that practice area.
• martin-t 6y ago
  Incompetence is a source of extreme inefficiency in modern society. People making decisions don't understand the things they're deciding. This is broken. And there's nobody sane in a position where they can say "STOP, this is dumb" and demote people to the level of their competence or fire them. A harmless example is movie / tv show plots not making sense - there's nobody willing to call out bullshit like obvious plot holes. This is how GoT went from a masterpiece of scheming characters driven by their motivation, making decisions based on information they had and dealing with the consequences to "she kinda forgot". A dangerous example is the government being full of people who are too incompetent, stupid or useless to get a real job. Sometimes the number of them in the system is so large that competent people can't get anything done to fix things. We need to do something to fix this. Positions of decision making power should require an IQ and/or knowledge test.
  • fasteddie31003 6y ago
    The levels of incompetence in government is embarrassing. The government definitely does not attract the best and brightest. However, they control ~30% of the US GDP. I need to make a website that list all the government fails. Looks like http://usagovernmentfails.com/ http://usagovernmentfails.com/ is available.
  • tekkk 6y ago
    I agree with your point but i would also want to point out this has been a problem since the dawn of man. Governments and organizations have been plagued by unending bureucracy and corruption that grows worse the longer it has been in existence. Humans have a tendency to protect their belongings or ego more than altruistically help others so it makes sense. Democracy has, as a general idea, been a way to solve this problem by creating a counterbalance that should prevent important decisionmakers from being overly selfish and at least show they are being effective and altruistic. But that system isnt really applicable for smale scale power dynamics. Unless efficiency, or in some cases having just common sense, is not monitored by anyone aka. there are no consequences for making poor decisions sooner or later no one will pay attention and they will be doing whatever they _think_ is best (or easiest) but without reality checks. But how to evaluate performance when dealing with abstract things? At least in the case of GoT the ratings did deteriorate so one could point out a problem in the system (albeit way too late, IMO s6 was when it should have been fixed). In other cases no one can see the damage they are doing (especially if they have never been really doing anything) so how to even tell it needs to be fixed? I think best cure to this problem is a great culture where being efficient is praised and rewarded. But changing already terrible culture, well, that's tough... (Interesting film on this matter is Ikiru by Kurosawa)
• pixel_tracing 6y ago
  So can people sue Deloitte or the government for their tax money back?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• daanlo 6y ago
  Imho this isn‘t all about the procurement process being broken. There must be something additinal broken that caused deloitte to fail at delivering this project.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fireeyed 6y ago
  “Govconnect powered by Salesforce”. How many licenses did the Federal government buy from Salesforce either through lipstick on a pig resellers like Deloitte or directly. You scratch my back, I will scratch yours.
• wiseleo 6y ago
  A large portion of legacy systems integration can be solved by asking the question “which data must be updated in real-time and which can wait for batch processing?” Screen scrape data from legacy terminal apps, export into SQL middleware, have the new app interact with the SQL middleware via modern APIs. All legacy data gets batch updated back into legacy systems, all new data gets stored and accessed in middleware. Eventually, the middleware becomes the primary data source and the entity can save on the electric bill.
• menomatter 6y ago
  I see this in big companies as well. I work for big pharma and 20-40 web projects are not unheard of. The dysfunction is not one sided. There are way too many people involved from the Big company that make it impossible to move fast allow engineers to do what's right. Instead it quickly turns in the Phinoix Project
• wakahiu 6y ago
  Well if it helps anyone: https://timelyhealth.co/ https://timelyhealth.co/