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 […]
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 […]
Via Michael Swaine (on Facebook) comes this Guardian story about the NSA apparently trying to silence a computer science professor blogging about possible encryption compromises: This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university’s […]
I don’t mean to seem to be picking on Microsoft, but the Surface really is a case of too little, too late, being crushed by Apple (premium) on one side and Android (commodity) on the other. The current leaks about the Surface 2 don’t look to change the game any; Woody Leonhard over at Infoworld […]
I experienced the stack-ranking method of subordinate evaluation during my two years at PricewaterhouseCoopers and had very serious reservations about it. Now, in just the past few days, I’ve learned that Microsoft has been using stack-ranking for its personnel since before Steve Balmer became CEO: The stack rank was harmful. It served as an incentive […]
Michael Swaine has been around, well, possibly even longer than I have, and has been far more prolific as an author and editor in both the programming and personal computer industries (many will remember him as an editor and author at Dr. Dobb’s Journal). Possibly inspired by recent events, he just coined the following twist […]
Over at IT World (via Slashdot) comes the news that Dell has stopped selling its Windows RT tablet without a keyboard (which had been priced at $299) and now only sells a Win RT tablet with a keyboard at $479: Dell made several changes to the RT offers on its website. By Friday evening it had […]
