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.
A very common pattern in a IT project such as the Healthcare.gov website is that those in the trenches know how bad things are, but those at the top don’t — or don’t want to know, leading to a phenomenon I noticed many years ago and named “the thermocline of truth“. What usually happens is […]
![Obamacare: descent into the maelstrom [UPDATED x2]](http://andstillipersist.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/131009-131009-maelstrom.jpg "Obamacare: descent into the maelstrom [UPDATED x2]")
As I have noted previously — here (pre-launch) and again here (post-launch) — the problems with the Healthcare.gov website (and, as a consequence, with the various state healthcare exchanges) are more than a few “glitches” or “bumps”. They appear to indicate serious, fundamental issues with the underlying architecture, design, and implementation of the Healthcare.gov systems. This […]
![Obamacare is offline ‘for a few hours’ each night this weekend for repairs [UPDATED x4]](http://andstillipersist.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/131005-131005-healthcaregov.jpg "Obamacare is offline ‘for a few hours’ each night this weekend for repairs [UPDATED x4]")
Late news today (Friday, October 4th) that the Healthcare.gov site will be taken down for repairs: Bedeviled by technology glitches that frustrated millions of consumers, the Obama administration is taking down its health overhaul website for repairs this weekend. Enrollment functions of the healthcare.gov site will be unavailable during off-peak hours, the Health and Human […]
[This post was written several days prior to the launch of Healthcare.gov on October 1, 2013 — I’d say that most of my predictions have been borne out, particularly in Update #3] For nearly 20 years, my professional focus has been on large-scale IT projects: why they succeed and why they so often fail. One of […]
First, Megan McArdle: “Banking without risk is impossible“: The fundamental fact of a banking crisis, which is different from a crisis in any other industry, is that if people believe a financial institution to be bankrupt, it actually is bankrupt. As Arnold Kling puts it, banks exist to reconcile the desire of households to […]
Over the past decade, I have found it interesting that Hollywood continues to be portrayed as a glamorous, serious business, while the video game industry is seen as a haven for nerds at best, and a cause of real-life violence at worst. What that overlooks is that the video game industry is more lucrative than […]
Via Slashdot comes this slap-your-forehead story over at TechDirt: As you may have heard, Boulder, Colorado has been hit by massive flooding over the past week, and it’s been something of a mess. A local company, Falcon UAV, makers of special drones which are built for the government, approved by the FAA, and specialize in […]
There is deeply ingrained in American culture — particularly nowadays on the Left — the stereotype of the scientist as pure in intent and action, caring only for the Truth, let the chips fall where they may. The scientist works readily with other scientists (except when s/he is working alone, late into the night, thinking […]
…I can’t do any better than point you at Mark Steyn explaining how thoroughly Putin has punked Obama: Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing […]
Hat tip to Reason for pointing to this CBS-2 exposé of illegal underground dinner parties in New York City: Clandestine dinner parties like the one Leitner attended have become more common in New York City. And insiders told Leitner they are completely unregulated. When asked at the dinner, “do you ever worry about getting caught?” […]