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 […]
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 […]
