Why hasn't any politician taken up a stance against bloated contracts like these? I think it's a cause that lots of folks could get behind.
Because the companies that get these contracts pay for the politician's war chest.
CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
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Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you're really paying for the development per se. Most of the effort is actually managing the customer. That is, their contracting requirements, the whole requirements process, procurement hoops, change process, optics management, cost of "sales", reporting requirements, various additional compliance requirements...
This is a large part of the truth. Crank out a booking website? Give me a couple weeks. Deal with your byzantine organization, your incoherent standards, your security department coming out of the woodwork with list of requirements, your torturous system for provisioning government services like VMs in secure data centres... and then pile on that integration with a variety of legacy systems across another slew of org…
And let's not forget that 1/3rd of the way through, when you're demonstrating an impressive amount of progress with a working prototype, some decision maker will say "you know, we could really make this a two-for-one if we tied it into this other program...", and start the 1,000 hours of meetings to get to development all over again.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#123The last time the US government made something to be proud of was 50 years ago with the Apollo program. Counter examples welcome!
The Hubble Space Telescope? (and the other "Great Observatories" satellites)
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don't forget the State of Oregon paid an additional $240 million for their own version of it [1]. [1] https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-...
Wow I’m amazed like how much money can made if you are into government contracting I’m just curious to know can you get government contracts let’s say if you are running a software agency
Yes, how to apply and secure governmental contracts and grants is something many educational curriculum miss out upon in life.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#125Germany also has its own controversy about corona software. The government wants to standardize on SORMAS, but many local governments don't want to switch.
I expected a dump, but to be honest, SORMAS looks pretty good. It's already in use by Nigeria and Ghana, and it's on Github. It's Java EE with Postgres on Ubuntu, so safe and sane tech choices. They even have a play version: https://sormas.helmholtz-hzi.de/sormas-ui/login that also looks ok. I'm thoroughly impressed.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#126Any insiders know the technology behind VAMS? I wonder if it is built on their ‘exalink’ platform?
I’m no longer with Deloitte, but I saw that they recently sold off their life sciences department to their only competitor- Model N [1]. The Exalink platform was born out of work being done for the life sciences department. I thought it was an interesting development that Deloitte sold them off since when I was still there it was being peddled as this great in-house cloud-agnostic system that could do whatever you wanted it to do (spoiler: it couldn’t). Anyways, maybe it is completely unrelated?
1: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/model-n-modn-acquires-deloit...
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#127> “The health-care software industry is enormous, and it exists largely because it’s privatized, it’s not standardized,” says Stone. “There are a lot of free-market inefficiencies. And the country doesn’t have a public health infrastructure, so there isn’t any real drive to fix it.”
> “You think about the industries that have been transformed by technology—someone said, How do we get a pizza to your house faster? That’s a competitive advantage,” he says. “That has not happened in American health care.”
The pizza industry is not a exactly standardized industry with public infrastructure either... the failure of VAMS (and healthcare.gov before it, and the unemployment systems, etc) shows that single government solution is not a fix for broken procurement and project management.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#128I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?
Or you could hire 73 engineers each paid 300k for a year, and have 22 million left over for hosting/operations/overhead costs... Absolutely ridiculous.
You get those 73 engineers in a room, then what? What do they write? You get 15 engineers, 3 DBAs, 5 sys admins + their managers. While that's spinning up, you get a bunch of business analyists to write the requirements. A first version gets written, it doesn't do what people want and the data it works from is really crappy, so you have to write a bunch of custom edge logic to deal with the crappy data. Repeat several times, including massive changes in scope.
Like is there bloat on these projects? 100%, and a lot of it, but saying "just get 73 solid engineers in a room" doesn't really get you very far when the requirements are really really unknown.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#129I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?
Liability and integration causes bloated costs.
The bigger issue is that it’s a no bid contract. However there’s no real process for verifying individuals who bid in a timely way.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#130The ridiculous expense of software in the health system is endemic. It’s a shame it’s been allowed to go on for so long.
A write up on why it’s so expensive from a standpoint of a developer. https://maxwelljordan.medium.com/why-healthcare-in-us-is-so-...