Webster is Principal and Founder at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at bwebster@bfwa.com, or you can follow him on Twitter as @bfwebster.
Decades ago, as a computer science undergrad at BYU, I took a graduate math class in catastrophe theory, taught by Prof. Helaman Rolfe Pratt Ferguson. This wasn’t because of particular skill on my part, but because I was working with one of my professors (Robert P. Burton) to develop 3-D graphics imaging technology to aid […]
Decades ago, while home for the holidays from college, I attended a church-sponsored all-night New Year’s Eve party for college students. The organizers, whom I knew, had cozened me into providing (for a few hours) one of the on-going entertainments. They had crudely decorated a refrigerator box to look like a mainframe computer and […]
Stephen Covey was fond of saying, “You teach what you are.” Regardless of what platitudes you speak, all you really teach is what you actually live and practice. It should not be surprising, then, that the same political and philosophical mindset that produced the Affordable Care Act and pushed it through Congress in spite of […]
The national media, having been forced by the sheer bad performance of Healthcare.gov since its launch two months ago, is once again facing a critical decision: will it, in fact, report how incomplete the system is and how poor its performance is compared to private sector standards, or will it take up its job […]
The media for the past three years has failed to do its job as independent and skeptical investigative journalists with regards to Obamacare in general and the essential technology infrastructure in particular — not just the Healthcare.gov website itself but all the back-end systems and the state exchanges as well. Even when Healthcare.gov launched, most […]
I have a new post up over at Ace of Spades about why Obamacare is different from the usual anti-GOP tropes put forward by the Democrats, and why they should be very, very afraid: 1) How many of you know someone who died in Hurricane Katrina? (Just thought I’d get that out of the way.) […]
The first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the schedule. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the schedule. — The Metric Law of 90s We’ve had a lot of percentages thrown around about the Healthcare.gov system lately: 30-40% remains to be done, 60-70% is complete, as of December 1st it will […]
![Obamacare and the Three Heads [UPDATED]](http://andstillipersist.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/131119-131119-3_headed.jpg "Obamacare and the Three Heads [UPDATED]")
In a large-scale, well-managed IT project, there are three key roles that need to be filled by three different people who are each talented, qualified, tough-nosed, and given commensurate authority. Actual titles may vary a bit, but the roles themselves are well-known: Project Manager. This person manages the personnel (and sub-organizations) on the entire project; […]
[minor edits and additions, as always] Back on October 25th, Jeffrey Zients “landed” at the White House and took charge of the ailing Healthcare.gov website. He famously declared at the time: “By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users. . . . Let me be clear: HealthCare.gov is fixable.” […]
The most valuable IT consultant is someone who stands athwart a failing software project, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. (with apologies to William F. Buckley) After a flurry of posts over several weeks on the unfolding Healthcare.gov […]