One of the Good Things About Obamacare's IT disaster is the possibility of the end of Waterfall Development in Government IT

This whole Obamacare IT stuff is going to keep going for a while.  The rest of the Tech industry can sit on the sidelines and let the US government and its vendors take the hit for outages, security breaches, bad customer service.

One of the possible outcomes is the end of Waterfall development.  The WSJ journal reports on a call for openness and transparency in development.  Words that sound like Agile Development.

The administration "must be fully transparent in their efforts to get the website working. Anything less than complete disclosure and accountability is not acceptable," she said.

Here is one amongst many comparisons of Agile vs. Waterfall.

Agile Vs Waterfall Model

It is worth mentioning here that the Waterfall model is the primitive model type and has been implemented in the development phase time after time. Hence in the due course if time developers found many drawbacks in this model which were later rectified to form various other development models.The common element to all of them being the basic phases of the waterfall approach. We can hence conclude that Agile is also another of its successors which has all the advantages of the primitive waterfall model and has also rectified the disadvantages in this evolved model.

Are you Neat or Messy workspace person? One of you is more creative

Harvard Business Review blog has a post that will polarize some of you.  Are you one who must have your desk clean and organized before you work?  Or are you one juggles a dozen different things with pieces of paper all over, books stacked randomly, and bunches of browser screens open?  One of you has a higher chance of being creative. According the HBR the messy are the more creative.

Don’t Tidy Up Before You Do Your Creative Thinking

by Andrew O’Connell  |   8:30 AM October 23, 2013

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Research participants in a room where papers were scattered on a table and the floor came up with5 times more highly creative ideas for new uses of ping-pong balls than those in a room where papers and markers were neatly arranged, says a team led by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota. A disorderly environment seems to aid creativity by helping people break from tradition, order, and convention, the researchers say.

Data Centers are not the place for creativity so a messy one is not a good one.  But, the desk of those of who work in the data center is another story.

Google increasing capacity in Hamina, reported spending $150 mil euros

Sometimes I wonder if this really news, but it is good to reference when there is a public disclosure.  Google’s data center group is adding capacity.  Ooh, I am so excited. :-)  What would be really big news is if Google was shutting down facilities.  Not going to happen any time soon.  Reuters reports on the latest that there will be a Nov 4 event for Google in Hamina.

After an initial investment of 200 million euros ($275.65 million), it announced on August 12 an additional 150 million in spending.

Sources said the company plans to announce another round of investment in early November, although it was unclear how much it would be. A government official confirmed Prime Minister Jyrki Katinen would attend an event at Hamina on November 4.

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.

Google's West and East Coast Floating Data Centers, taking a trip to South America?

CNET news reports on the 2nd spotting of Google’s Floating data center in Portland, Maine.

The registration on the Portland barge is "BAL 0011," which ties it to the barge in San Francisco Bay, which has the registration number "BAL 0010." Both are owned by By and Large, LLC.

(Credit: Tom Bell/Portland Press Herald)

If that wasn't enough to establish that the two are related, it's also clear that both were built on barges owned by the same company. The one in San Francisco Bay was built on top of a barge with the registration "BAL 0010," while the one in Portland harbor is on a barge with the registration "BAL 0011." According to online documents, both are owned by By and Large, LLC. That company, which has a miniscule online profile, is also the current tenant in Hangar 3, an immense building alongside the pier where the San Francisco Bay project is under construction.

With one in the SF Bay and the other in Portland that puts a Floating data center on each coast.  I wouldn’t think there is a plan to send these cross the Pacific and Atlantic.  Seems easier to build these in Taiwan or Amsterdam if you wanted them on the other side of the Ocean and minimize the risk of making a cross ocean excursion.

It will be interesting where these show up.  I would guess if the floating data centers move, they would move to South America to provide data center capacity like I wrote about earlier.