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.
Here is our annual Veterans Day post listing the vets in our respective families: ============= Bruce Webster: CPL Darren Green, USMC (active) — served twice in Afghanistan; married and still active. CPL Jon A. Webster, USMC (former) — served in al Rutbah, Iraq; now going to school [son] Heather Harris, US Army National Guard (former) — […]
I published a post over at Ace of Spades yesterday on what is likely to happen next with the Healthcare.gov development effort: So, what can you expect next? There are two basic courses that a project such as this takes at this point: oscillation or off-line. Oscillation is what happens when the developer continues to push […]
“Running the gauntlet” refers to a ceremony of passage, trial, or even execution wherein a person is forced to walk or run between two lines of people who are usually armed with clubs, whips, or other weapons. The people in the lines are then free to strike at the person running up the middle. […]
I read the original “Ender’s Game” short story when it was published in Analog (August 1977). I was startled, because I knew the author, Orson Scott Card, slightly. He and I attended Brigham Young University at roughly the same time (he was a year ahead of me), I had met him a few times, and […]
Much has come out in the past few days over the late, minimal, and unsuccessful testing done on Healthcare.gov before it was put into production. From what I’ve read so far, it was pretty appalling and highly unprofessional. Here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote several years ago, as part of my […]
[made some minor edits and corrected a few typos] A friend of mine, a staunch Obamacare supporter, made a comment the other day, saying in effect, “Since you Republicans are complaining about the lousy website launch, you must have already conceded the argument on healthcare reform itself.” Well, no. The current mess we find ourselves […]
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. — Henry David Thoreau There is a pattern I commonly see in troubled or failing IT projects, a near-constant oscillation over a period of weeks in the system’s readiness and/or stability. It appears for a while that […]
The big news out of Washington in the past 24 hours is that the Healthcare.gov website has been turned over to one of the project contractors, and that Healthcare.gov will be up and working by the end of November — which is to say, in five (5) weeks. Jeffrey Zients, a former top White House official pulled back […]
[Made a few minor edits] [added an additional clip suggested by Jim Geraghty] There’s a running threat/gag in The Empire Strikes Back involving the hyperdrive of the Millennium Falcon. Various attempts are made to fix it, but it keeps not working, usually with Han Solo saying, “It’s not my fault!” Towards the very end of […]
I hardly know where to start. I just spent the last two days working on a matter involving a $100 million failed IT project, and it seems like a pleasant walk in the park compared to the news that keeps leaking out about the Healthcare.gov debacle. Let me start by saying: there is no royal […]