Deloitte is a horrible consulting company. They designed an awful financial system implementation at the company I worked at and we just kept giving them more money and they kept bringing in more entry-level consultants. They even billed us multiple times for work we did ourselves... I thought it was also shady that one of our department heads was married to the Deloitte partner who led that practice area.
CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
611–620 of 688 posts
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the analogy. Why would I give the requirements for making a website to someone who doesn't make websites? The government should do whatever anyone who wants a website does, hire someone to make a website. What's the issue?
Politics. This is how hospital software is handled (at least in Finland). The one making the decisions is the head doctor in the hospital, because they have the most power. They know fuck-all about software and fuck-all about the day to day work of the nurses and doctors who need to use the product every day. And this is pretty much how we ended up giving Epic Systems 774 million for their MUMPS-flavoured piece of sh…
Not the same industry, but it’s changing. Silicon Valley meets big Gov:
https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/anduril/
Basically, build first at the VC’s risk and then deliver a finished product to Gov.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person. Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.
It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract). In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, f…
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Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a lot of $6-700/hr management consultants that don't know much about tech but are happy to channel their inner Steve Jobs to try and architect something. The 22 year olds might not be able to do it (I beg to differ), but can management consultants/accountants who barely took typing in school who have Excel as the height of their digital literacy be expected to have all the answers? By the time this gets t…
> and use Excel as the height of their digital literacy In Germany we literally use fax and enter data by hand. A project that successfully moved things to an emailing Excel sheets based workflow would be absolutely revolutionary.
No longer true:
https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/corona-test-digital-...
And it wasn't really true before either, most of the Ämter used the Demis system.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Detect IE, redirect to a static site with a 1-800 number, have a call centre staffed with people running Chromebooks schedule an appointment over the phone. Probably cheaper overall, and certainly a better user experience for the tech-challenged seniors.
Something to note about this strategy is that older versions of IE (10 and older) only support TLS 1.0 by default. Below 8 you're stuck with TLS 1.0 and can't even enable anything higher. So if " https://www.cdc.gov " is using modern web security IE users won't even get to request data from the server, so you can't detect their browser.
To add more info. TLS 1.0 is prohibited from usage by many regulations and it will be immediately flagged by any security audit/tools. The government contract most certainly includes clauses about security and following recommended practices.
In short, anything below IE 11 is de-facto out of the picture.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is because of government pay scales they can’t fill those digital agency roles with the right people Within a year or two the good staff end up working at the consulting shops and influence their former employers
Could big tech firms help by loaning out their employees on sabbatical, or could they sponsor government tech positions? It feels like so much of the talent there would be very useful to the government, which would probably have a positive feedback loop on the economy as a whole.
Companies have no incentives to improve the economy as a whole when the same time can be spent with a higher ROI on improving the company's own fortunes in particular. Give them the right incentives and only then it'll happen.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment. TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax." With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly. Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a…
I can't think of a worse solution. Sure, it effectively raises their salary, but it is full of moral pitfalls. It is already outrageous that government employees are exempt from social security taxes.
Uh, what? Former federal employee here. I've got one of my pay stubs in front of me and there is definitely a social security line.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#618> Deloitte is the only contractor that can meet the project requirements, because configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform. Therefore, no other contractor has rights or access to leverage the system to carry out O&M activities, such as the administration of the system, change and defect management and end user support. As the only contractor with the GovConnect…
Corporations love regulations. Let’s remember this when we support things like net neutrality. They always try and sneak regulatory burden in any of these bills.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#619Incompetence is a source of extreme inefficiency in modern society. People making decisions don't understand the things they're deciding. This is broken. And there's nobody sane in a position where they can say "STOP, this is dumb" and demote people to the level of their competence or fire them.
A harmless example is movie / tv show plots not making sense - there's nobody willing to call out bullshit like obvious plot holes. This is how GoT went from a masterpiece of scheming characters driven by their motivation, making decisions based on information they had and dealing with the consequences to "she kinda forgot".
A dangerous example is the government being full of people who are too incompetent, stupid or useless to get a real job. Sometimes the number of them in the system is so large that competent people can't get anything done to fix things.
We need to do something to fix this. Positions of decision making power should require an IQ and/or knowledge test.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#620So can people sue Deloitte or the government for their tax money back?