7 ms·

Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

44 points by robdoherty2 13y ago

hga 13y ago
Too many lies in this article to take more from this than the bare fact that CGI Federal will be replaced by Accenture (the latter of which is no prize from what I've heard). I.e. the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were notoriously the "prime contractor" until the 3rd week of October (when replaced by contractor QSSI, also responsible for the "data hub"), and the attacks on the contractors are misplaced when their management was so impossibly bad. The linked Washington Post article is not great, but better: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-to-end-contract-with-cgi-federal-company-behind-healthcaregov/2014/01/10/001eb05a-719e-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-...
- coldcode 13y ago
  Accenture taking over is like replacing dumb & dumber with larry, moe and curly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sciguy77 13y ago
Is anyone surprised by this?
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it definitely is not necessarily usual. Companies usually win contracts of this magnitude because they "have people who know people". Consequently, "CGI Federal" is, or at least was, well connected with the people in government necessary to shovel boondoggles their way. It is what it is. I guess in this case the poor optics overcame the connections.
- larockt 13y ago
  Slightly surprised, but only because I would have thought that the company had kept up their payments to the necessary campaign funds.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
greg5green 13y ago
>>Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange. Hasn't California's exchange had big problems too?
- angersock 13y ago
  Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local). EDIT: Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere. The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  The website for California's exchange is still broken; it's broken so badly that the customer support phone # the site tells you to call is outright rejecting calls (lots of people having issues). You get a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes you should (slightly paraphrased) go fuck yourself and use the nonfunctional website. They have an online chat queue for customer support that's similarly busted; you sit in the queue for hours with the ETA randomly changing before it says you've been booted out of the queue.
- ollysb 13y ago
  I've always been under the impression that accenture were a "bums on seats" consultancy, graduates cranking out low quality java code.
- smsm42 13y ago
  California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.
coherentpony 13y ago
No shit. This whole ordeal has been nothing short of a complete and utter fucking disaster. And how much did the government pay to have this work done [1]? This is procurement at its finest. The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up who would have done a much better job utilising scalable technologies. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...
- rayiner 13y ago
  > The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.
  - coherentpony 13y ago
    >And if it failed Fixed that for you.
    - cstejerean 13y ago
      Oh, this project would have failed anyway. A lot of the work is integration with backwards systems, in a political environment. Point me at the startup engineers that are interested in working on that. Sure, a mythical online website built from scratch in Node.js with a Mongo backend can be out together by a bunch of college graduates, but without talking to a dozen other systems this site is not going to do much, and as soon as you take people out of the comfort zone of shiny toys we'll see how long the remain interested when you end up in SOAP and CORBA or are screen scraping mainframes. The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.
      - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
        I think thats unfair. Interaction with legacy systems is all the future has left, plus its a problem - and the most elegant hack to scrape the aging DoJ mainframe wins the prize. No, its clear public data architecture has to change.
crbnw00ts 13y ago
What's sad is that it wasn't so long ago we were treated to breathless articles regarding the software that was used as part of the President's re-election campaign, which apparently was well-tested and well-engineered enough to actually do its job when the time came: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... It seems today's politicians are (at least in some cases) familiar with what it takes to build reliable software. Perhaps the problem is that they are only willing to see that it's done when it benefits them directly, but not when their constituents need it.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules. Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers.
  - dclowd9901 13y ago
    > Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers. And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      > And don't think for a second that this is unintentional. Okay, what if I do?
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        It was probably intended as something else, but it has probably become a way for discouraging competition through mechanisms like regulatory capture.
protomyth 13y ago
The government isn't exactly doing too well with any of its software projects. The IRS had problems during tax season and the FBI has cancelled and restarted multiple times. The Dept of Interior has been held in contempt of court for how bad their systems have been.
wehadfun 13y ago
I here the points about about legacy systems. How much would it have cost to scrap those old systems and build from the ground up.
dreamfactory2 13y ago
Talk about going from the frying pan to the fire.
patrickg_zill 13y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer? If Washington DC is, in fact, really that stupid and it is not intentional, under what strange notion of justice am I to pay taxes to these morons?
- krisdol 13y ago
  >Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer? Probably not the only one. I don't think they were intentional, but I pray you're right because single-payer is a much superior system.
- smsm42 13y ago
  Depends on what you mean by intentional. I'm not sure if the guys that call the shots are Machiavellian enough for such things - given how incompetent they are in everything else, hard to imagine they would be super-competent in long-reaching plots. If they had been able to execute long-running plans of such magnitude with such certainty, they wouldn't screw up so many things so badly as they had. However, the resulting vector of their efforts and failures may very well point into that direction, and not without their cooperation and help, since once they beat insurance industry into full dependency and make the population rely on subsidized care, the next logical step would be to eliminate the middlemen - there would be no point for them to exist anymore, at least not as independent entities - given that they would have no independence as such and serve no useful function in such setup.
bane 13y ago
One of the differences between creating and enforcing laws and creating software is that software actually has to work. The efficacy of a law is open to endless debate, and it doesn't actually have to end up with any intended effect. But software, you can't legislate software. It's obvious that government shouldn't be in the software business, and the government would agree "that's why we use contractors for this!". But when 100% of your revenue comes from the government, in a way you're basically the same thing.

44 points by robdoherty2 13y ago

hga 13y ago

Too many lies in this article to take more from this than the bare fact that CGI Federal will be replaced by Accenture (the latter of which is no prize from what I've heard). I.e. the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were notoriously the "prime contractor" until the 3rd week of October (when replaced by contractor QSSI, also responsible for the "data hub"), and the attacks on the contractors are misplaced when their management was so impossibly bad. The linked Washington Post article is not great, but better: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-to-end-contract-with-cgi-federal-company-behind-healthcaregov/2014/01/10/001eb05a-719e-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-...

coldcode 13y ago
Accenture taking over is like replacing dumb & dumber with larry, moe and curly.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sciguy77 13y ago

Is anyone surprised by this?

Iftheshoefits 13y ago
I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it definitely is not necessarily usual. Companies usually win contracts of this magnitude because they "have people who know people". Consequently, "CGI Federal" is, or at least was, well connected with the people in government necessary to shovel boondoggles their way. It is what it is. I guess in this case the poor optics overcame the connections.
larockt 13y ago
Slightly surprised, but only because I would have thought that the company had kept up their payments to the necessary campaign funds.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

greg5green 13y ago

>>Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it built California’s new health insurance exchange. Hasn't California's exchange had big problems too?

angersock 13y ago
Accenture is Arthur Andersen, and they've got a long history of extracting maximum value for shareholders from government contracts (state and local). EDIT: Arthur Andersen spawned Andersen Consulting spawned Arthur Anderson Business Consulting spawned Accenture. Some of AABC splintered off and joined Hitachi Consulting, some went elsewhere. The history of computer consulting is varied, interesting, and tragic.
kevingadd 13y ago
The website for California's exchange is still broken; it's broken so badly that the customer support phone # the site tells you to call is outright rejecting calls (lots of people having issues). You get a recorded message saying that due to high call volumes you should (slightly paraphrased) go fuck yourself and use the nonfunctional website. They have an online chat queue for customer support that's similarly busted; you sit in the queue for hours with the ETA randomly changing before it says you've been booted out of the queue.
ollysb 13y ago
I've always been under the impression that accenture were a "bums on seats" consultancy, graduates cranking out low quality java code.
smsm42 13y ago
California exchange site sucked big time at the start and still sucks, but I've heard stories of people I know that actually signed up there. So compared to healthcare.gov it works better. Compared to normal proper site it's a disaster (or at least was couple of months ago when I last checked) but I guess good enough for government work.

coherentpony 13y ago

No shit. This whole ordeal has been nothing short of a complete and utter fucking disaster. And how much did the government pay to have this work done [1]? This is procurement at its finest. The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up who would have done a much better job utilising scalable technologies. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

rayiner 13y ago
> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.
- coherentpony 13y ago
  >And if it failed Fixed that for you.
  - cstejerean 13y ago
    Oh, this project would have failed anyway. A lot of the work is integration with backwards systems, in a political environment. Point me at the startup engineers that are interested in working on that. Sure, a mythical online website built from scratch in Node.js with a Mongo backend can be out together by a bunch of college graduates, but without talking to a dozen other systems this site is not going to do much, and as soon as you take people out of the comfort zone of shiny toys we'll see how long the remain interested when you end up in SOAP and CORBA or are screen scraping mainframes. The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      I think thats unfair. Interaction with legacy systems is all the future has left, plus its a problem - and the most elegant hack to scrape the aging DoJ mainframe wins the prize. No, its clear public data architecture has to change.

crbnw00ts 13y ago

What's sad is that it wasn't so long ago we were treated to breathless articles regarding the software that was used as part of the President's re-election campaign, which apparently was well-tested and well-engineered enough to actually do its job when the time came: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-t... It seems today's politicians are (at least in some cases) familiar with what it takes to build reliable software. Perhaps the problem is that they are only willing to see that it's done when it benefits them directly, but not when their constituents need it.

Pxtl 13y ago
The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules. Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  > Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers. And don't think for a second that this is unintentional.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > And don't think for a second that this is unintentional. Okay, what if I do?
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      It was probably intended as something else, but it has probably become a way for discouraging competition through mechanisms like regulatory capture.

protomyth 13y ago

The government isn't exactly doing too well with any of its software projects. The IRS had problems during tax season and the FBI has cancelled and restarted multiple times. The Dept of Interior has been held in contempt of court for how bad their systems have been.

wehadfun 13y ago

I here the points about about legacy systems. How much would it have cost to scrap those old systems and build from the ground up.

dreamfactory2 13y ago

Talk about going from the frying pan to the fire.

patrickg_zill 13y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer? If Washington DC is, in fact, really that stupid and it is not intentional, under what strange notion of justice am I to pay taxes to these morons?

krisdol 13y ago
>Am I the only one who thinks that the failures were intentional - that the whole mix-up is a passive-aggressive way of herding the USA into eventual single-payer? Probably not the only one. I don't think they were intentional, but I pray you're right because single-payer is a much superior system.
smsm42 13y ago
Depends on what you mean by intentional. I'm not sure if the guys that call the shots are Machiavellian enough for such things - given how incompetent they are in everything else, hard to imagine they would be super-competent in long-reaching plots. If they had been able to execute long-running plans of such magnitude with such certainty, they wouldn't screw up so many things so badly as they had. However, the resulting vector of their efforts and failures may very well point into that direction, and not without their cooperation and help, since once they beat insurance industry into full dependency and make the population rely on subsidized care, the next logical step would be to eliminate the middlemen - there would be no point for them to exist anymore, at least not as independent entities - given that they would have no independence as such and serve no useful function in such setup.

bane 13y ago

One of the differences between creating and enforcing laws and creating software is that software actually has to work. The efficacy of a law is open to endless debate, and it doesn't actually have to end up with any intended effect. But software, you can't legislate software. It's obvious that government shouldn't be in the software business, and the government would agree "that's why we use contractors for this!". But when 100% of your revenue comes from the government, in a way you're basically the same thing.