8 ms·

Oregon Health exchange board puts director on notice over stalled website

36 points by mountaineer 13y ago

mountaineer 13y ago
"Oracle vice president Tom Budnar told the board that his firm had brought in additional people, including a "swat team" to ensure the site should be able to enroll people by the end of December." This is a vice president at a software company?
- stock_toaster 13y ago
  > This is a vice president at a software company? This is a vice president at Oracle.
- typicalrunt 13y ago
  I hope he didn't really mean "swat" and it was simply misinterpreted by the writer. Perhaps he meant bringing in a SWOT team [1]. In big corps I've often heard SWOT used when an emergency happens. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
  - newman314 13y ago
    No, he probably did mean SWAT. It's been used by management (as well as the term "tiger teams") to describe a supposed crack team of members that will just swoop in and get everything fixed.
    - gaius 13y ago
      You obviously is a swat to swat bugs in your software!
  - 001sky 13y ago
    This is a strategy template, not a trauma checklist. Unless you're intentionally being Ironic. BigCos may be slow and even dumb but they're not typically stupid.
    - jgeorge 13y ago
      This /is/ Oracle we're talking about here, so those aren't odds I'd bet on, personally.
- sp332 13y ago
  King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones. If the current batch of people can't get the job done, replacing them is reasonable.
  - eitally 13y ago
    My money is on the technical people being perfectly competent but the business stakeholders fighting over turf and the systems architecture being what suffers. This is already guaranteed given the number of moving parts involved, but with a government project requiring partnership with private business (the actual insurance companies .. or heck, even Medicaid), it has to be much, much worse than normal. I can just picture in my head a developer requesting an RESTful API for simple data interchange and the current owner of the legacy system they're asking about being 1) clueless, 2) hamstrung, or 3) actively impeding progress. Repeat this song and dance ad infinitum over the course of the project and you end up with a complex system designed to work in the specific use case of the conference room pilot prior to go-live ... but which will fail everything else.
    - jgeorge 13y ago
      I have quite a bit of experience with at least a couple of the same Oracle products that are in the middle of this fiasco. Competent technical people or not, the products being implemented here have a reasonably well known track record (amongst their users) of just plain not working.
- miahi 13y ago
  Oracle is huge. It has 17 Senior/Executive Vice Presidents[1] and a lot more "normal" vice presidents[2]. Looks like[3] Tom Budnar is [one of the] VP at "North America Technology & Government Consulting". [1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.ht... [2] http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracle&companyScope=C&title=group%20vice%20president&trk=TSEO_SN&rsid=762358571384548061188&openFacets=G,N,CC&page_num=1&pt=people http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracl... [3] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transcripts/board/8_8_13_board_documents.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transc...
- wizzard 13y ago
  You would think that the "A-team" would have already been on such a high-profile and time-sensitive project from the beginning, but who knows. No matter how you feel about Obamacare I think it's had an effect I certainly never would have predicted: At this point it's become kind of an indictment of the software industry, whether deserved or undeserved. It seems like every news story ends up insinuating that devs are incompetent.
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    Time sensitive? Sure there was a fairly hard deadline but the Oregon site has been under construction for 3 years. As for incompetent developers, I don't know if the public thinks that at all. I think the standard public response is the usual gov't bureaucracy getting in the way. States communicating with multiple Fed departments has got to be daunting. And if one of those isn't online and working properly or changes requirements midway through you've got some problems.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    I hope this is a watershed moment for government IT. There have been bigger government IT failures before (IRS modernization - 12 years, $3.7 billion) but never before has a government IT project failure jeopardized the success of a major policy initiative and had negative consequences for millions of Americans. I hope this is finally the kick in the pants that the government needs to fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the government IT procurement process.
- softbuilder 13y ago
  Someone never read Brooks.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    "King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones." Looks like your Mr King sort of skimmed the book. (From the UK: land of the millions of pound software failures) PS: Oracle isn't the government people
- Shivetya 13y ago
  Welcome to corporate America, replaying the worst team structures of the 80s and 90s. Seems the new fad is to have even more layers than before. Essentially, too many to make a good decision but enough to prevent anyone from taking responsibility when it fails.
naterator 13y ago
It is stunning how this past year has changed my views on government. Between this massive healthcare fuck up, the spying, the shutdown, and all the rest that doesn't need mentioning, I am basically becoming a crotchety old conservative who says formulaic things like: "Government can't do anything right"; "Governments never give up power once you let them have it". I basically went from a liberal college student to a full blown conservative/libertarian (if I pigeonhole myself into common stereotypes). Of course, I'm not even that, because I wouldn't vote for those fucking idiots either.
- interstitial 13y ago
  To be fair, this generally happens with age anyway. We slowly come to the realization that idealism is often a mask for arrogance and a false-confidence borne of insecurity. As we mature, we not only see the failings of our former naive selves, but the folly of such idealism in and of itself. The opposite of idealism is not cynicism, but realism.
  - ritchiea 13y ago
    Hold on there. Realism isn't ideological. One person's realism may be turning to conservatism, another person's realism may be pushing to systematically address failures in government to prevent them in future cases.
    - interstitial 13y ago
      Indeed it may, but it's a general framework of pragmatism which accepts short term compromises along the way. Often leading to less than ideal outcomes in the long run. Hence, my claim it is the opposite of idealism. Not necessarily a better opposite.
- buckbova 13y ago
  > Governments never give up power once you let them have it This is a universal truth.
  - 13y ago
tzs 13y ago
California's exchange: 28k people signed up in the first week. Washington's exchange: 55k enrolled (mostly in Medicaid) in October, and another 40k applied for coverage. Colorado: 37k in October. Kentucky: 32k. New York: 47k. There were some glitches here in Washington. They had stability and speed problems at launch. They took the site down for a few hours, and then overnight, for maintenance. Within 48 hours, it was fixed and has been stable ever since. One of the keys to Washington's success was to treat the exchange as essentially a startup. They sought people to build the site who thought it was a great thing to do and found it exciting and interesting, not contractors who would see it as just more 9 to 5 work to do. Article on the above: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-obamacare-20131113,0,4963580.story#axzz2kkXpE7MV http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-obamacare-201...
- GVIrish 13y ago
  I don't know the specifics of the Washington healthcare exchange, but I can tell you right now, the healthcare.gov didn't fail because they chose contractors to do the job, they failed because of extremely incompetent management on the government side. Had a start up been chosen to do healthcare.gov, and none of the government management were changed, even the best start up would've failed too. The same contractors that did healthcare.gov (CGI Federal) also developed the Kentucky exchange, which has been lauded as one of the more successful state exchanges. If the contractor was the problem, you'd have expected them to fail in Kentucky too.
  - rafaelsanp 13y ago
    Not calling you wrong, but it looks like there were concerns about the competence of the contractors[0]. It was certainly paired with bad management, though. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399200/internal-emails-reveal-warnings-healthcare-gov-wasnt-ready http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399...

36 points by mountaineer 13y ago

"Oracle vice president Tom Budnar told the board that his firm had brought in additional people, including a "swat team" to ensure the site should be able to enroll people by the end of December." This is a vice president at a software company?

stock_toaster 13y ago
> This is a vice president at a software company? This is a vice president at Oracle.
typicalrunt 13y ago
I hope he didn't really mean "swat" and it was simply misinterpreted by the writer. Perhaps he meant bringing in a SWOT team [1]. In big corps I've often heard SWOT used when an emergency happens. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
- newman314 13y ago
  No, he probably did mean SWAT. It's been used by management (as well as the term "tiger teams") to describe a supposed crack team of members that will just swoop in and get everything fixed.
  - gaius 13y ago
    You obviously is a swat to swat bugs in your software!
- 001sky 13y ago
  This is a strategy template, not a trauma checklist. Unless you're intentionally being Ironic. BigCos may be slow and even dumb but they're not typically stupid.
  - jgeorge 13y ago
    This /is/ Oracle we're talking about here, so those aren't odds I'd bet on, personally.
sp332 13y ago
King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones. If the current batch of people can't get the job done, replacing them is reasonable.
- eitally 13y ago
  My money is on the technical people being perfectly competent but the business stakeholders fighting over turf and the systems architecture being what suffers. This is already guaranteed given the number of moving parts involved, but with a government project requiring partnership with private business (the actual insurance companies .. or heck, even Medicaid), it has to be much, much worse than normal. I can just picture in my head a developer requesting an RESTful API for simple data interchange and the current owner of the legacy system they're asking about being 1) clueless, 2) hamstrung, or 3) actively impeding progress. Repeat this song and dance ad infinitum over the course of the project and you end up with a complex system designed to work in the specific use case of the conference room pilot prior to go-live ... but which will fail everything else.
  - jgeorge 13y ago
    I have quite a bit of experience with at least a couple of the same Oracle products that are in the middle of this fiasco. Competent technical people or not, the products being implemented here have a reasonably well known track record (amongst their users) of just plain not working.
miahi 13y ago
Oracle is huge. It has 17 Senior/Executive Vice Presidents[1] and a lot more "normal" vice presidents[2]. Looks like[3] Tom Budnar is [one of the] VP at "North America Technology & Government Consulting". [1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.ht... [2] http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracle&companyScope=C&title=group%20vice%20president&trk=TSEO_SN&rsid=762358571384548061188&openFacets=G,N,CC&page_num=1&pt=people http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracl... [3] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transcripts/board/8_8_13_board_documents.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transc...
wizzard 13y ago
You would think that the "A-team" would have already been on such a high-profile and time-sensitive project from the beginning, but who knows. No matter how you feel about Obamacare I think it's had an effect I certainly never would have predicted: At this point it's become kind of an indictment of the software industry, whether deserved or undeserved. It seems like every news story ends up insinuating that devs are incompetent.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  Time sensitive? Sure there was a fairly hard deadline but the Oregon site has been under construction for 3 years. As for incompetent developers, I don't know if the public thinks that at all. I think the standard public response is the usual gov't bureaucracy getting in the way. States communicating with multiple Fed departments has got to be daunting. And if one of those isn't online and working properly or changes requirements midway through you've got some problems.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  I hope this is a watershed moment for government IT. There have been bigger government IT failures before (IRS modernization - 12 years, $3.7 billion) but never before has a government IT project failure jeopardized the success of a major policy initiative and had negative consequences for millions of Americans. I hope this is finally the kick in the pants that the government needs to fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the government IT procurement process.
softbuilder 13y ago
Someone never read Brooks.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  "King at the end of the meeting clarified that he never asked Oracle to bring in additional people – just better ones." Looks like your Mr King sort of skimmed the book. (From the UK: land of the millions of pound software failures) PS: Oracle isn't the government people
Shivetya 13y ago
Welcome to corporate America, replaying the worst team structures of the 80s and 90s. Seems the new fad is to have even more layers than before. Essentially, too many to make a good decision but enough to prevent anyone from taking responsibility when it fails.

naterator 13y ago

It is stunning how this past year has changed my views on government. Between this massive healthcare fuck up, the spying, the shutdown, and all the rest that doesn't need mentioning, I am basically becoming a crotchety old conservative who says formulaic things like: "Government can't do anything right"; "Governments never give up power once you let them have it". I basically went from a liberal college student to a full blown conservative/libertarian (if I pigeonhole myself into common stereotypes). Of course, I'm not even that, because I wouldn't vote for those fucking idiots either.

interstitial 13y ago
To be fair, this generally happens with age anyway. We slowly come to the realization that idealism is often a mask for arrogance and a false-confidence borne of insecurity. As we mature, we not only see the failings of our former naive selves, but the folly of such idealism in and of itself. The opposite of idealism is not cynicism, but realism.
- ritchiea 13y ago
  Hold on there. Realism isn't ideological. One person's realism may be turning to conservatism, another person's realism may be pushing to systematically address failures in government to prevent them in future cases.
  - interstitial 13y ago
    Indeed it may, but it's a general framework of pragmatism which accepts short term compromises along the way. Often leading to less than ideal outcomes in the long run. Hence, my claim it is the opposite of idealism. Not necessarily a better opposite.
buckbova 13y ago
> Governments never give up power once you let them have it This is a universal truth.
- 13y ago

tzs 13y ago

California's exchange: 28k people signed up in the first week. Washington's exchange: 55k enrolled (mostly in Medicaid) in October, and another 40k applied for coverage. Colorado: 37k in October. Kentucky: 32k. New York: 47k. There were some glitches here in Washington. They had stability and speed problems at launch. They took the site down for a few hours, and then overnight, for maintenance. Within 48 hours, it was fixed and has been stable ever since. One of the keys to Washington's success was to treat the exchange as essentially a startup. They sought people to build the site who thought it was a great thing to do and found it exciting and interesting, not contractors who would see it as just more 9 to 5 work to do. Article on the above: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-obamacare-20131113,0,4963580.story#axzz2kkXpE7MV http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-obamacare-201...

GVIrish 13y ago
I don't know the specifics of the Washington healthcare exchange, but I can tell you right now, the healthcare.gov didn't fail because they chose contractors to do the job, they failed because of extremely incompetent management on the government side. Had a start up been chosen to do healthcare.gov, and none of the government management were changed, even the best start up would've failed too. The same contractors that did healthcare.gov (CGI Federal) also developed the Kentucky exchange, which has been lauded as one of the more successful state exchanges. If the contractor was the problem, you'd have expected them to fail in Kentucky too.
- rafaelsanp 13y ago
  Not calling you wrong, but it looks like there were concerns about the competence of the contractors[0]. It was certainly paired with bad management, though. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399200/internal-emails-reveal-warnings-healthcare-gov-wasnt-ready http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399...