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"...is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." Wait, for $240 million, isn'

"...is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." Wait, for $240 million, isn't Oracle supposed to be managing the "complex IT project." So sad that Oregon couldn't find something other than a soul sucking corporate behemoth.

EdSharkey 12y ago
So this wasn't a well-meaning state incompetence meets huge pile of unaccounted federal cash tragedy?
gregd 12y ago
It isn't a matter of Oracle managing this complex IT project. There would have been at least 2 PMs (one for Oracle and one for the State), probably more with a project of this scale. The question that I had, and continue to have, is who signed off on the deliverables? There should have been numerous deliverables along the way, with a release of funds with each signed off deliverable. In my mind, those who signed off on the deliverables (as working) are ultimately the ones responsible for it's failure..
- lucasjans 12y ago
  I'm an Oregonian. (Not proud about it in this case.) My understanding is that Oregon structured a very poor contract which allows them little recourse. Further, payment and deliverables were disconnected. This lawsuit is likely just about politics. http://www.opb.org/news/article/legal-recourse-stymied-by-cover-oregon-audit/ http://www.opb.org/news/article/legal-recourse-stymied-by-co... "That kind of contract means Oracle wasn’t being paid for a working website; it was being paid for the time it spent working on the project. It would have been up to the administrator to make sure the website worked, but the state decided not to hire one, and gave itself that role."
  - gregd 12y ago
    Holy shit, I had not seen this information previously. So it looks like Oracle (through a roundabout arrangement with Dell) was on price agreement and they entered into a time & materials contract with Oracle and paid them via POs. Jesus christ on a cracker. Now I wonder if the Legislature had to approve OHAs limitation like they did with my Agency? In other words, we had to get permission from the Legislature to spend our own money (outside of normal operating costs). I had to budget my big IT expenses before each biennium and wrap them up into Policy Option Packages that then got presented to the Legislature to get approval to implement them. Yes, this was for things like new servers, hyper-v, etc. What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars. That means that each PO was over 3 Million dollars (provided it was divided up evenly between each PO). Was there no chain of accountability on these POs? Who approved them? Who had oversight on this process?
    - blocke 12y ago
      "What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars." Actually since you mentioned it: "The purchase orders state that the purchase had to be split across multiple POs due to ADPICS controls. OHA explained that this was due to limitation on the authority of the OHA purchaser entering the POs into the ADPICS procurement system." So they had to split the POs up to get them past the business rules implemented in their accounting platform? Heh. (http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs/co_assessment.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs/co_assessment.pdf page 36)
      - gregd 12y ago
        So reading these findings is kind of enlightening. As a former Manager with the State of Oregon, the lines about competing priorities really resonates with me. DAS (Dept. of Administrative Services) was tasked at one point with unifying IT and related services throughout the state, which basically forced them to look at the state as one entire enterprise. Good in theory, not so good in practice. I think what has proven to be true, is that each Agency has very different needs and wants with regards to IT and projects that fall into that realm. The report goes on to mention that "the project seemed to lack a consistent, cohesive enterprise approach to managing the project." This sounds like DAS wrote this. It goes on to say, "The focus was on establishing an enterprise solution for the exchange and for the DHS Modernization project.". Again it sounds like DAS wrote this. A key component (I think) that screwed the process was not keying vendor payment to deliverables, well and paying time & materials only. Fucking unbelievable. If I had been involved in this project, I would have gone on record in the beginning as against this setup and I would have considered it doomed to fail. It's interesting that they put together an RFP for a Systems Integrator and during the open question process "Carolyn Lawson said that she called potential system integrators and was told that they were not interested in bidding due to the lack of clear requirements and the limited budget (the state requested $96M, but was only funded $48)" So no potential bidders would bid on this fiasco.
  - cothomps 12y ago
    ^^ Oregon deciding to have Oracle consulting engage on a time and materials contract is the big problem. Hint: always, always do these on bid. No one ever saves money/budget on consultants working time and materials.
    - slavik81 12y ago
      Having seen these contracts in action on a smaller scale, time and materials works great if there is continuous delivery. If you're not getting value for your money, you can identify it earlier and cut your losses. If you do a firm fixed price contract, the contractor takes on all the risk and will charge a much higher price to compensate. You'll also spend a lot more time and energy on writing bulletproof contracts because the stakes are so much higher. Worse, you'll need to do contract negotiations for every requirements change. It's possible to make either work, though. I don't think using a different contract type would have fixed the root problem here.
bdunbar 12y ago
Who that isn't a soul-sucking corporate behemoth is going to bid on a government project of that scope?
- rbanffy 12y ago
  Was the scope so big or was it only a question of scale? Does anyone have the requirements document?
rdtsc 12y ago
Oracle -- the typical golf-ware. Some salesperson from Oracle played golf with the person in charge of the check book. Nobody really looked at requirements. A decision was made from above and code monkeys below in the chain got a heaping pile of shit on their lap -- "Here, use this crap, build a website that kinda does this. You have to use these tools." They are both to blame. Well Oracle made a pretty penny, so financially they know how to do this. I once knew an Oracle salesperson. Asked them what they thought of PostgreSQL, including the companies providing paid support for it. And the response was nobody can tough us, because we know how to sell and market our stuff to the top brass. Those at the top listen more to the salesmen like that than to their own employees. Then obviously there is kickbacks and all kinds of incentives.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  While I'm sure people will have many excuses, I think you are right. $200M+ for a health insurance portal that includes zero novel technologies, algorithms, or other sources of fundamental technology uncertainty, never mind actual risk, has room for multiple crimes of fraud, bribery, and other malfeasance. There are multiple comparable projects against which to measure this one and find the outlier events. All that said, a successful lawsuit and even criminal prosecutions won't make a significant sent in similar future cases. Governments have got to start acting like a large, collaborative, transparent monopsony, and to demand that vendors draw on and contribute to a pool of open source software, and to form consortia to audit and maintain that pool. That would be a huge benefit to the technology industry, and to taxpayers.
ilaksh 12y ago
I am sure there were several people attached to this project who knew that decisions were being made that doomed it. Those people may have had families or something and so weren't willing to risk their jobs in order to try to get through to the managers about how fucked the thing was. Actually, most people don't even consider explaining to their bosses how bad things are structured. They just accept whatever box they are put in without even examining it closely. Which is a big problem. But goes back to people wanting to keep their jobs. The thing is that structures of often so fucked, it literally puts people's jobs in jeopardy in order to fix them. For example, if a PM at one point realized that there was no actual working deliverable after X months, they probably realized it was because of some decisions a boss or another PM had made. So in order to rectify that situation, they would need to say or do something that could potentially get that person fired, or try to convince that person, either of which would mean it was likely they themselves would be fired. Basically I think that people usually don't want to rock the boat because they are scared, and so its easy for them to say something is someone else's problem and just keep their heads down. Comes down to politics as much as actual ability or knowledge. Hierarchies make it worse. When you start with the decision to give millions of dollars to fucking Oracle, you can either have that boss replaced or assume the project is fucked.
- tuukkah 12y ago
  An interesting description of a downside in at-will employment - reminds me of the stories about culture supposedly tying the hands of Korean pilots. People shouldn't be afraid of getting fired if they voice the truth. I bet office politics can make your work uncomfortable elsewhere too, but at least you can't be fired without a good demonstrated reason.
chrismcb 12y ago
$240 million for what? I need to figure out how to get one of the contracts.

EdSharkey 12y ago

So this wasn't a well-meaning state incompetence meets huge pile of unaccounted federal cash tragedy?

gregd 12y ago

It isn't a matter of Oracle managing this complex IT project. There would have been at least 2 PMs (one for Oracle and one for the State), probably more with a project of this scale. The question that I had, and continue to have, is who signed off on the deliverables? There should have been numerous deliverables along the way, with a release of funds with each signed off deliverable. In my mind, those who signed off on the deliverables (as working) are ultimately the ones responsible for it's failure..

lucasjans 12y ago
I'm an Oregonian. (Not proud about it in this case.) My understanding is that Oregon structured a very poor contract which allows them little recourse. Further, payment and deliverables were disconnected. This lawsuit is likely just about politics. http://www.opb.org/news/article/legal-recourse-stymied-by-cover-oregon-audit/ http://www.opb.org/news/article/legal-recourse-stymied-by-co... "That kind of contract means Oracle wasn’t being paid for a working website; it was being paid for the time it spent working on the project. It would have been up to the administrator to make sure the website worked, but the state decided not to hire one, and gave itself that role."
- gregd 12y ago
  Holy shit, I had not seen this information previously. So it looks like Oracle (through a roundabout arrangement with Dell) was on price agreement and they entered into a time & materials contract with Oracle and paid them via POs. Jesus christ on a cracker. Now I wonder if the Legislature had to approve OHAs limitation like they did with my Agency? In other words, we had to get permission from the Legislature to spend our own money (outside of normal operating costs). I had to budget my big IT expenses before each biennium and wrap them up into Policy Option Packages that then got presented to the Legislature to get approval to implement them. Yes, this was for things like new servers, hyper-v, etc. What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars. That means that each PO was over 3 Million dollars (provided it was divided up evenly between each PO). Was there no chain of accountability on these POs? Who approved them? Who had oversight on this process?
  - blocke 12y ago
    "What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars." Actually since you mentioned it: "The purchase orders state that the purchase had to be split across multiple POs due to ADPICS controls. OHA explained that this was due to limitation on the authority of the OHA purchaser entering the POs into the ADPICS procurement system." So they had to split the POs up to get them past the business rules implemented in their accounting platform? Heh. (http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs/co_assessment.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs/co_assessment.pdf page 36)
    - gregd 12y ago
      So reading these findings is kind of enlightening. As a former Manager with the State of Oregon, the lines about competing priorities really resonates with me. DAS (Dept. of Administrative Services) was tasked at one point with unifying IT and related services throughout the state, which basically forced them to look at the state as one entire enterprise. Good in theory, not so good in practice. I think what has proven to be true, is that each Agency has very different needs and wants with regards to IT and projects that fall into that realm. The report goes on to mention that "the project seemed to lack a consistent, cohesive enterprise approach to managing the project." This sounds like DAS wrote this. It goes on to say, "The focus was on establishing an enterprise solution for the exchange and for the DHS Modernization project.". Again it sounds like DAS wrote this. A key component (I think) that screwed the process was not keying vendor payment to deliverables, well and paying time & materials only. Fucking unbelievable. If I had been involved in this project, I would have gone on record in the beginning as against this setup and I would have considered it doomed to fail. It's interesting that they put together an RFP for a Systems Integrator and during the open question process "Carolyn Lawson said that she called potential system integrators and was told that they were not interested in bidding due to the lack of clear requirements and the limited budget (the state requested $96M, but was only funded $48)" So no potential bidders would bid on this fiasco.
- cothomps 12y ago
  ^^ Oregon deciding to have Oracle consulting engage on a time and materials contract is the big problem. Hint: always, always do these on bid. No one ever saves money/budget on consultants working time and materials.
  - slavik81 12y ago
    Having seen these contracts in action on a smaller scale, time and materials works great if there is continuous delivery. If you're not getting value for your money, you can identify it earlier and cut your losses. If you do a firm fixed price contract, the contractor takes on all the risk and will charge a much higher price to compensate. You'll also spend a lot more time and energy on writing bulletproof contracts because the stakes are so much higher. Worse, you'll need to do contract negotiations for every requirements change. It's possible to make either work, though. I don't think using a different contract type would have fixed the root problem here.

bdunbar 12y ago

Who that isn't a soul-sucking corporate behemoth is going to bid on a government project of that scope?

rbanffy 12y ago
Was the scope so big or was it only a question of scale? Does anyone have the requirements document?

rdtsc 12y ago

Oracle -- the typical golf-ware. Some salesperson from Oracle played golf with the person in charge of the check book. Nobody really looked at requirements. A decision was made from above and code monkeys below in the chain got a heaping pile of shit on their lap -- "Here, use this crap, build a website that kinda does this. You have to use these tools." They are both to blame. Well Oracle made a pretty penny, so financially they know how to do this. I once knew an Oracle salesperson. Asked them what they thought of PostgreSQL, including the companies providing paid support for it. And the response was nobody can tough us, because we know how to sell and market our stuff to the top brass. Those at the top listen more to the salesmen like that than to their own employees. Then obviously there is kickbacks and all kinds of incentives.

Zigurd 12y ago
While I'm sure people will have many excuses, I think you are right. $200M+ for a health insurance portal that includes zero novel technologies, algorithms, or other sources of fundamental technology uncertainty, never mind actual risk, has room for multiple crimes of fraud, bribery, and other malfeasance. There are multiple comparable projects against which to measure this one and find the outlier events. All that said, a successful lawsuit and even criminal prosecutions won't make a significant sent in similar future cases. Governments have got to start acting like a large, collaborative, transparent monopsony, and to demand that vendors draw on and contribute to a pool of open source software, and to form consortia to audit and maintain that pool. That would be a huge benefit to the technology industry, and to taxpayers.

ilaksh 12y ago

I am sure there were several people attached to this project who knew that decisions were being made that doomed it. Those people may have had families or something and so weren't willing to risk their jobs in order to try to get through to the managers about how fucked the thing was. Actually, most people don't even consider explaining to their bosses how bad things are structured. They just accept whatever box they are put in without even examining it closely. Which is a big problem. But goes back to people wanting to keep their jobs. The thing is that structures of often so fucked, it literally puts people's jobs in jeopardy in order to fix them. For example, if a PM at one point realized that there was no actual working deliverable after X months, they probably realized it was because of some decisions a boss or another PM had made. So in order to rectify that situation, they would need to say or do something that could potentially get that person fired, or try to convince that person, either of which would mean it was likely they themselves would be fired. Basically I think that people usually don't want to rock the boat because they are scared, and so its easy for them to say something is someone else's problem and just keep their heads down. Comes down to politics as much as actual ability or knowledge. Hierarchies make it worse. When you start with the decision to give millions of dollars to fucking Oracle, you can either have that boss replaced or assume the project is fucked.

tuukkah 12y ago
An interesting description of a downside in at-will employment - reminds me of the stories about culture supposedly tying the hands of Korean pilots. People shouldn't be afraid of getting fired if they voice the truth. I bet office politics can make your work uncomfortable elsewhere too, but at least you can't be fired without a good demonstrated reason.

chrismcb 12y ago

$240 million for what? I need to figure out how to get one of the contracts.