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If anyone saw this briefing, it was mostly a lot of really technologically illiterate people asking pointed questions about a gigantic set of systems that can't

If anyone saw this briefing, it was mostly a lot of really technologically illiterate people asking pointed questions about a gigantic set of systems that can't easily be answered to technologically illiterate people. At one point, a congressman, with the tone of a disappointed parent, said (paraphrased) "I am very disappointed in you all. have yet to hear any one of you say sorry to the American people." Someone in the room retorted with "we didn't hear an apology when the government shut down either." (You'd expect someone to get timeout for this kind of pettiness.) With that said, one of the obvious problems was blame shift, as this article points out. The guy was (I don't remember this particular interchange) most likely outlining the fact that the question being asked of him wasn't relevant to "his responsibilities" in the contract. However, when responsibilities of a project are distributed, things fall through the gap. This article is a bit too short to give enough space for the subject, but I think it does point out the most important issue - no one really had full control of the project.

uptown 13y ago
I watched most of it yesterday. It was a fascinating post-mortem of a software project. What I saw was a small minority of politicians that seemed to have a handle on some of the technological challenges at-hand. Some politicians used their time to score political points completely unrelated to the technology issues - basically "our party is good / your party is bad" idiocy. Some politicians read prepared smart-sounding questions which they wouldn't be able to rephrase in another-way if they were asked to. One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong. And none of the company representatives were willing to accept that they'd done much wrong - instead taking every opportunity to blame people or entities not in the room.
- aryastark 13y ago
  > One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong. No need to worry, folks! Your government is on top of things. I wonder, how many Congress idiots does it take to fix the caching policy on a web server?
monsterix 13y ago
Totally agree. One of the thoughts that came to my mind is that a public project like this one sh(c)ould be open source right from the beginning. That would solve a lot of quality issues on one hand, and probably the pricing will also be better for the Government/taxpayers. While I am pretty sure that most congressmen do not get it, but there are some very qualified and awesome technical people who work in the Government. Probably, someone has to have the balls and call it open source one fine day.
- Osiris 13y ago
  My opinion is that anything that the government funds should be open source. Patents that come from government funded research, software projects, electronic voting, should all be open source. If we, the people, paid for it, we should be able to have access to it.
  - monsterix 13y ago
    > anything that the government funds should be open source. Generalization to open source everything that the Government does, or taxpayers fund, might not be such a great idea. There are some projects which are supposed to be secret (Like a NSA that's focused only on anti-socials) because they give our Government an edge over others. Probably a competent agency with an oversight to decide on open/closed aspect can help, but the subject needs much longer and detailed debate. IMO, healthcare, education, civil investigations are perfect examples where we can go completely open source. Or get disrupted the valley way.
    - swalsh 13y ago
      To be fair, I'd imagine the technology running PRISM is really incredible... i'd love if they could open source any of that.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Open source would certainly help in terms of transparency and hopefully quality but bottom line is that it would not have saved this project. This project failed because of incompetent management. Requirements came in so late that development didn't even start until March of this year, and requirements were changing right up until the week before launch. Only one week of full integration testing was performed. While open source should be used in government IT, that's not the main problem in government IT. The main problems are poor project management, a lack of accountability, a broken contract award process, and decisions makers who don't understand IT well enough to guide these projects to fruition. Open source would not solve any of those problems.
Bsharp 13y ago
> If anyone saw this briefing, it was mostly a lot of really technologically illiterate people asking pointed questions about a gigantic set of systems that can't easily be answered to technologically illiterate people. This is, unfortunately, what every discussion among politicians regarding any sort of technology is.
swalsh 13y ago
Is there a video link where we can watch it?
- jcutrell 13y ago
  I can't seem to find it - may be a bit longer than they want to post. I'll dig around some more.
  - us0r 13y ago
    http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ImplementationofH http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ImplementationofH
protomyth 13y ago
for those who want to form their own opinion, the hearing can be viewed at: http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ppaca-implementation-failures-didn’t-know-or-didn’t-disclose#video http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ppaca-implementation... I believe the part about end-to-end testing and HIPA were something that needed to be asked and was not answered in an acceptable manner. There are some technical folks on that committee and they even showed source code.

uptown 13y ago

I watched most of it yesterday. It was a fascinating post-mortem of a software project. What I saw was a small minority of politicians that seemed to have a handle on some of the technological challenges at-hand. Some politicians used their time to score political points completely unrelated to the technology issues - basically "our party is good / your party is bad" idiocy. Some politicians read prepared smart-sounding questions which they wouldn't be able to rephrase in another-way if they were asked to. One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong. And none of the company representatives were willing to accept that they'd done much wrong - instead taking every opportunity to blame people or entities not in the room.

aryastark 13y ago
> One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong. No need to worry, folks! Your government is on top of things. I wonder, how many Congress idiots does it take to fix the caching policy on a web server?

monsterix 13y ago

Totally agree. One of the thoughts that came to my mind is that a public project like this one sh(c)ould be open source right from the beginning. That would solve a lot of quality issues on one hand, and probably the pricing will also be better for the Government/taxpayers. While I am pretty sure that most congressmen do not get it, but there are some very qualified and awesome technical people who work in the Government. Probably, someone has to have the balls and call it open source one fine day.

Osiris 13y ago
My opinion is that anything that the government funds should be open source. Patents that come from government funded research, software projects, electronic voting, should all be open source. If we, the people, paid for it, we should be able to have access to it.
- monsterix 13y ago
  > anything that the government funds should be open source. Generalization to open source everything that the Government does, or taxpayers fund, might not be such a great idea. There are some projects which are supposed to be secret (Like a NSA that's focused only on anti-socials) because they give our Government an edge over others. Probably a competent agency with an oversight to decide on open/closed aspect can help, but the subject needs much longer and detailed debate. IMO, healthcare, education, civil investigations are perfect examples where we can go completely open source. Or get disrupted the valley way.
  - swalsh 13y ago
    To be fair, I'd imagine the technology running PRISM is really incredible... i'd love if they could open source any of that.
GVIrish 13y ago
Open source would certainly help in terms of transparency and hopefully quality but bottom line is that it would not have saved this project. This project failed because of incompetent management. Requirements came in so late that development didn't even start until March of this year, and requirements were changing right up until the week before launch. Only one week of full integration testing was performed. While open source should be used in government IT, that's not the main problem in government IT. The main problems are poor project management, a lack of accountability, a broken contract award process, and decisions makers who don't understand IT well enough to guide these projects to fruition. Open source would not solve any of those problems.

Bsharp 13y ago

> If anyone saw this briefing, it was mostly a lot of really technologically illiterate people asking pointed questions about a gigantic set of systems that can't easily be answered to technologically illiterate people. This is, unfortunately, what every discussion among politicians regarding any sort of technology is.

swalsh 13y ago

Is there a video link where we can watch it?

jcutrell 13y ago
I can't seem to find it - may be a bit longer than they want to post. I'll dig around some more.
- us0r 13y ago
  http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ImplementationofH http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ImplementationofH

protomyth 13y ago

for those who want to form their own opinion, the hearing can be viewed at: http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ppaca-implementation-failures-didn’t-know-or-didn’t-disclose#video http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ppaca-implementation... I believe the part about end-to-end testing and HIPA were something that needed to be asked and was not answered in an acceptable manner. There are some technical folks on that committee and they even showed source code.