Revenge of the Nerds, Technologists are in the drivers seat for fixing Obamacare

As much as technology is important in society rarely is the direction of a country directed by technologists.  I was reading Foxnews latest criticism of Obama’s apology for cancelled insurance and this paragraph reminded me of a “Revenge of the Nerds” moment.

“The president now is toxic," he said. "The thing is called ObamaCare. There's no running away from it, it's got his name on it. You see the president, you think about the policy and you know that it's a disaster. And the problem for the Democrats is they are hostage to a bunch of geeks working around, right now, late into the night, trying to fix a system which is not just the glitches it talked about, the architecture, the underlying structure of it is wrong."

Todd Park, the CTO in charge of fixing Obamacare has refused to testify in front of congress until after Nov 30.  Park has hung out the “DO NOT DISTURB” sign to congress which of course pisses them off.

An official in the Office of Science and Technology Policy told Issa that Park was too busy repairing HealthCare.gov to appear before December. 

"Pulling him away from that work even for a short time at this stage would be highly disruptive," wrote Donna Pignatelli, assistant director for legislative affairs. 

The letter proposed scheduling another hearing for the first two weeks of December and making Park available for an informal staff briefing sometime this month. 

The alternatives "would permit Mr. Park's intensive work on improving HealthCare.gov during this critical period to continue unabated," Pignatelli wrote.

Park is right.  Talking to Congress is going to do nothing to fix Obamacare website by Nov 30.

Who knows the US government may slowly figure out what any growing successful company knows.  Information Technology is key to the success of the company  Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and so many others are built on data centers as the foundation of transforming services.

Politicians are disturbed that the technology doesn’t work according to the law.  As hard as it is to get laws through congress, they are finding out technology doesn’t care about the laws.  It would be interesting to see how many things in the Obamacare website are no-win situations where there are conflicts in requirements that make no sense, and the execution into code will confuse the users.

Obamacare could be the pivot point, or the start of more problems for politicians who are frustrated with information technology.  

Wonder how many start-ups think as we scale, let’s add a Washington DC politician to our staff.  Versus, how many people in Washington DC are thinking we need to add some information technology people.  I don’t know about you, but the brightest in IT don’t think of going to DC in their career path.

Obama's Obamacare peer reviewed by President Carter, tried your best which is questionable

Peer reviewing is good for the soul if you want to learn from your mistakes and build better systems.  I use peer review all the time to test ideas, software, and research.

How much better would Obamacare be if it had run through a peer review process?  Well, it is going through peer review now to get things fixed.

Here is an interview with President Carter in Parade, and you guessed it Obama comes up.  

On how he would evaluate the Obama presidency so far:
JC: “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances. His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.”

Ouch.  Your Democratic President peer with years more experience lays it out to the public.  Sometimes the best way to get people to change is not to tell the person, but to tell the public what you would tell that person.

Oh yeh, BTW I found this article through one of my super smart friends I have known for 25 years.  He has Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google on his resume.  I have HP, Apple, Microsoft.  With friends to run peer reviews, we try not to do really stupid things like Obamacare V1.0.

Hey that’s it.  Obamacare will be like Windows, it will be good in version 3.0.  Who was a Windows 1.0 or 2.0 user.  By the time 3.0 came out there were 10X-100X more users.  Oops, that’s not going to help Obamacare now.

Sad that $300 mil spent on Obamacare creates no innovation, the benefits of a risk-less approach

One of the sad things about the $300 mil spent on Obamacare is there is no innovation that comes from the effort.  NASA’s mission to put a man on the moon had huge risks and has many innovations it can claim.  Here is a NASA pdf you can check out.

From a technical standpoint there isn’t anything Obamacare is doing that is innovative.  In fact, you can think of what is the flaw of Obamacare is living in the 60’s with a procurement process for buying commodities applied to IT.

That cancer is called “procurement” and it’s primarily a culture driven cancer one that tries to mitigate so much risk that it all but ensures it. It’s one that allowed for only a handful of companies like CGI Federal to not only build disasters like this, but to keep building more and more failures without any accountability to the ultimate client: us. Take a look at CGI’s website, and the industries they serve: financial services, oil and gas, public utilities, insurance. Have you had a positive user experience in any of those industries?

The cancer starts with fear. Contracting officers — people inside of the government in charge of selecting who gets to do what work — are afraid of their buys being contested by people who didn’t get selected. They’re also afraid of things going wrong down the line inside of a procurement, so they select vendors with a lot of “federal experience” to do the work. Over time, those vendors have been consolidated into pre-approved lists like GSA’s Alliant schedule. Then, for risk mitigation’s sake, they end up being the only ones allowed to compete for bids.

This results in a culturally accepted idea that cost implies quality. To ensure no disasters happen, throw lots of money at it. And when things go terribly wrong, throw more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem. While this assumption may work well with commodities (want to ensure that you get lots of high-quality gravel? Buy a lot more gravel than you need, then throw out the bad gravel) the evidence points to the contrary with large IT purchases: they usually fail.

Single Point of Failure brings down Obamacare, Data Services Hub is down

CNN reports on the latest Obamacare outage.  A single point of failure in the Data Services Hub on Sunday caused the site to not be able to finish transactions.

I think the US Government is learning single points of failure are bad.  They need redundancy.  Verizon has the contract for the data hub, seems like AT&T should have been in there as well.  Anyone who has run a 24x7 service would never single source their network connectivity.

A malfunction in key technology behind the Obamacare websiteleft users unable to apply for health coverage Sunday.

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, a vendor networking issue at Verizon subsidiary Terremark was to blame. Peters said the vendor had "experienced a failure in a networking component," and the attempted fix crashed the system.

Obamacare isn't broken, it worked to maximize profit and control like any other government IT project

It is funny to watch so many people think fixing the Obamacare/healthcare.gov website is a technical issue where resources can be sent in to repair the site.  Some do discuss the fix is not easy like Politico’s post.

“We would have done this” for a fraction of the price, “and it would have been working perfectly,” Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Bay Area global cloud provider Salesforce.com, said in an interview. “But we were turned away.”

Obamacare was like any other big government IT project.  Lots of competitive bids for those who know how to play the rules of Washington DC.  Once you win, you do things according to the rules of government IT.  You make progress, give lots of long status reports.  Then ship to hit an Oct 1 deadline.

Government IT comprises a network of systems that have developed over the past half-century, said Mike Hettinger, the Software & Information Industry Association’s director of public sector innovation. In some cases, thousands of homegrown networks feed into one payroll or financial system. Whereas a scrappy Silicon Valley startup could wipe out a project that doesn’t work, a much larger government agency doesn’t have that luxury.

These systems usually get built around schedules, such as the Oct. 1 deadline that contractors rushed to meet. Commercial companies don’t tend to have such a locked time frame.

The lack of functionality for Obamacare is not anything new for a government IT project.  You then wait for the next budget cycle and get more money to fix things.

There are some projects that work well in government IT, and this is why the process continues.  Standardize on one methodology that applies to all government projects, all employees, and all citizens.  Collect all requirements, and use these requirements to increase the complexity and budget of the project.  And, this is where the conflicts start to happen between those who understand how software should work vs. those who don’t.

Fixing Obamacare will change how the profit is made and who is in control of the project.  Once there are new rules for where the money is to be made and who is in control, then Obamacare will work in a new way.  Will this fix things for end users.  Not necessarily.