The article mentioned only one side of the problem: the acquisition process. The government must follow the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR - http://www.a

The article mentioned only one side of the problem: the acquisition process. The government must follow the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR - http://www.acquisition.gov/far/ http://www.acquisition.gov/far/) when contracting purchases of equipment and/or services. The FAR is not agile and is so strict that you CANNOT already know what you want, you must make the contract as generic as possible. Especially on large contracts (over $5M). For example, you can't say that you need laptops with Intel Core i5 processors because that would unfairly exclude other processor vendors from competing. The other side of the problem, arguably the bigger side, is that most of the people in the acquisition process do not know how to write a contract that is flexible and really gets the government what it needs. For such a large project as the health care website, the people at Health and Human Services most certainly did not know how to articulate what they wanted. They could've hired a company to help them determine their requirements and write a proposal, but that's a significant (and long) undertaking itself. In short, government systems will never be user friendly, scalable, or secure because we don't know how to acquire such a system.