Obamacare's Healthcare.gov operations is the new IT spectator sport, a bunch of us are having good laughs

President Obama got on TV to assure us the Healthcare.gov website will be fixed and if you want to skip the web site you can call a 1-800 number.  Uh, the 1-800 number has problems too.

There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"

The author goes on to point out a flaw in using the 1800 phone system.

There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"

The Washingpost focuses on the damage control and Obama's speech pretty much ignores the significance of the problems.

"Hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work" is an understatement. "Hasn't worked" is closer to the truth.

But you wouldn't have known that from Obama's speech. Most of it was dedicated to the good the federal health-care law is already doing. The president emphasized that the Affordable Care Act "is not just a Web site." It's a Medicaid expansion, and it's got consumer protections, and delivery-system reforms, and all of those are ongoing.

The Washingpost highlights that the website operation is critical for the legalize and success of Obamacare.

The problem is that much of the law is a Web site. When the White House defined what it would mean for the Affordable Care Act to be a success, that definition ran right through the Web site. And Obama knows the Web site needs to be fixed. "We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team," he promised. "And we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed."

I don't know about you, but a bunch of my friends are getting some good laughs.

As we all know developing solutions that need to scale to millions of users is really hard.  The US government has never had a system that has millions of users regularly using a website as individual users.  

In the end despite all the posturing by Obama, and the Best IT talent in the country, we'll see if Obamacare succeeds or not.

In the end, though, Obama's speech doesn't matter. Either the Web site will be fixed in a reasonable time frame, and the law will work, or it won't be fixed and the law will begin to fail. The Affordable Care Act is no longer a political abstraction. It's the law, and it will be judged not on how well politicians message it, but how much it does to improve people's lives.

The 4 things that are signs of Mobile Change, Strengths of Blackberry fade

When I worked with construction guys I had to have a Blackberry Curve.  After 3 months I figured out the construction world and I were not compatible and within another 3 months I was to dump the Blackberry Curve and the construction company.  Now I have an iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and Blackberry is near end of life.  There are some who really miss their Blackberry Curve.  Do I?  No.  I have iPhone apps and social features.  I have Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with 1920 x 1080 display, quad core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32 GB  + 64 GB microSD storage, Stylus, and Android.

So what do Blackberry Curve loyal users miss?  

1. Physical Keyboard

2. Blackberry Server for reliable e-mail

3. Days of battery life

4. A kick ass cell antenna

These 4 strengths of the Blackberry Platform is so irrelevant to a large percentage of the market.  I don't use my Phone to check e-mail, but don't write on it.  Reliable e-mail is a cloud service many times better than an enterprise IT group. Plugging in once a day is OK.  Although I am sometimes able to go 2 days with my Galaxy Note 3.  I spend 98% of my time connected to wifi.

Don't scare your users/customers with your Innovation

If you believe the mass perception there is a huge need for Innovation.  Almost all companies say they want to be innovative and they support innovation in their company.

But, there is a dark side to innovation.  Innovation means change, and change means you need to adapt.  Adapting means you may not be as good at the new way as the old way.  so, maybe it is best to just keep your old habits, and new thing will be a fad and go away.  Yeh.  I'll put my head in the sand.  :-)

HBR has a blog post on making innovative ideas less terrifying.

Rarely have I had that kind of immediate trust and social currency when proposing something new.  More often, I’ve experienced the opposite reaction:  what I consider genius ideas have been greeted with blank faces, disapproving stares, and occasionally the outright smackdown.

New ideas tend to evoke fear and anger – we are programmed to prefer the comfort and safety of established norms. Much as I want to believe that a glaringly good idea will stand on its merits, I have come to realize that just like any product or service, ideas require good marketing if they’re going to reach their intended customers.

Huh,  I think what I need to try is pitch a new idea as "safe innovation"  Proven risk free change.

According to the research on successful entrepreneurs, their single most important trait is the ability to persuade.  Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, unless your boss is as comfortable with disruption as Clay Christensen is, your ability to persuade is tightly linked to your ability to assuage fear. To get buy-in for any new idea, whether your customer is your manager, your direct reports, your teenage son, the CEO, de-risking is essential.  The ability to jump to a new vision or product or job almost always requires that those around us, our fellow stakeholders, also leap to a new curve of learning. If you’re looking for a break for your breakthrough ideas, prepare to skydive:  pack a parachute for you and your colleagues.

A smile from Heaven, Olivier Sanche's environmental efforts paying off

Apple's Lisa Jackson at the Sustainability Conference Verge, and GigaOm sent a reporter to core the presentation.

Apple’s high profile new environmental chief — the former head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency — Lisa Jackson spoke publicly for one of the first times on Wednesday after taking the role at Apple four months earlier. At thesustainability conference VERGE, Jackson said she plans to pump up Apple’s efforts in using energy more efficiently and bringing more clean power to Apple’s data centers and office buildings.

“Tim Cook didn’t hire Lisa Jackson to be quiet and keep the status quo. We understand our responsibility and we do care,” said Jackson.

tweet this

The article continues with the efforts Apple has been making in the past.

Jackson came to Apple when the company already had begun to devote more money and time on increasing its use of renewable electricity at its data centers and taking other actions to lower its carbon footprint.

When I read this, I immediately think of Olivier Sanche who had the passion to green Apple's data centers.

It is sad to think it has been 3 years since Olivier left us.  This time of year is when I remember Olivier the most.  His birthday was Oct 4, and he left us in Nov at Thanksgiving 2010.  A bunch of us are getting together at 7x24 Exchange in San Antonio in Nov 17-20, and I am sure we'll chat about Olivier's impact on us.

In The Cloud do you have visibility of the Physical Infrastructure? No, which means a problem when a Superstorm like Sandy Hits

The way some people talk the Cloud is the only way to go.  Part of being the Cloud is it is Opaque. You can't see the details.  The Cloud is not transparent.  What kind of transparency.  If you knew Superstorm like Sandy was coming to hit an area where you have your Cloud Service, can you determine the physical risk to the facility?

I was reading GigaOm's Barb Darrow's post on lessons from Superstorm Sandy for IT and it is a good summary of some of the lessons.

What superstorm Sandy taught us about protecting IT infrastructure

by Barb Darrow

3 HOURS AGO

2 Comments

• A
• A

photo: Getty Images

SUMMARY:

Some post-storm lessons are no brainers — make sure you have the right fuel hoses as well as the fuel itself? Duh. Others may come as surprise.

Then I thought.  Wait if you are in a Cloud service in NYC, you can't find out anything like she suggests.

3: Carefully assess the backup power situation

Even if you have plenty of fuel for backup generators, it won’t help if the generators themselves or the pumps to supply them get flooded in a basement. If this gear must stay on lower floors, make sure it’s fully encapsulated and waterproofed, said Michael Levy, analyst at 451 Research.

Post Sandy, service providers should also make sure they have roll-up generators as well as fuel hoses onsite and easily accessible, said Ryan Murphey VP of operations for PEER 1 Hosting. Oh, and make sure those hoses fit both the generators and the fuel trucks.

If you were in a colocation site, you can tour the facility to do your own assessment and you have contacts to discuss the physical facility.  Can you communicate to the facility department at AWS in Ashburn, VA?  Hell no.

If you have mission critical information in the cloud do you want more transparency?  Hell Yes.

Add this to another reason why users move out of Cloud's like AWS to colocation facilities.

Here is an example where AWS's data centers went down vs. Digital Realty and Dupont Fabros during a power outage.

The two largest wholesale data center operators in the northern Virginia market said their data centers performed flawlessly during last weekend’s electrical storms, maintaining electrical power during grid outages and keeping customers online. Digital Realty Trust (DLR) owns 19 data centers in the region, whileDuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) operates seven facilities. Between them, the two companies operate more than 3.3 million square feet of data center space in northern Virginia.

The announcements provide a contrast to the performance of Amazon Web Services, which had a data center that was knocked offline by power outages during the storms that hit northern Virginia Friday night. While the storms were powerful, other leading data center operators were able to keep their facilities online. The announcements also indicated where Amazon’s failures didn’thappen. Amazon is a major tenant for Digital Realty, leasing 448,895 square feet in six properties, including several in northern Virginia. The announcement made it clear that the Amazon outage did not occur in one of Digital Realty’s buildings, as some have speculated.

Digital Realty said its data centers in northern Virginia “operated as designed and engineered to maintain the highest degree of reliability. These uptime metrics are based on a comprehensive evaluation of the Company’s facilities worldwide using standard industry methodology.

Cloud's have outages.  And with lack of transparency of physical facilities your risk exposure is unknown.  Kind of scary.