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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

#621

Post by colomon »

brtkdotse wrote: post #415
aasasd wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.

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.

There's a bassoonist urban legend (possibly true) that Bernstein wrote the ludicrous high Fs in the West Side Story bassoon part so that one of his pals who played bassoon would have to be hired for the pit orchestra, because he was the only one around who could play that high.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#622

Post by fasteddie31003 »

martin-t wrote: post #619

Incompetence 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 plo…

The levels of incompetence in government is embarrassing. The government definitely does not attract the best and brightest. However, they control ~30% of the US GDP. I need to make a website that list all the government fails. Looks like http://usagovernmentfails.com/ is available.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#624

Post by specialist »

theshrike79 wrote: post #486
StavrosK wrote: post #426

Earlier 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…

Dr Corn Flower (Blue).

That was our nickname for our worst customer. Some wannabe nerd promoted to CIO, probably to keep him away from patients and the other staff.

His most substantial contribution was divining the precise shade of the highlight color used by our theme.

Our "portal" had labs, scripts, meds, notes, referrals, and on and on. Stuff like lab reports were industry standard (we had domain experts on our team). Dr Corn Flower had opinions on all of it. Not detail too small to argue about. Every pixel mattered.

We eventually got to the point where two team member's full time job was babysitting Dr Corn Flower, while others were permitted to do real work (skunkworks style).

And that was just one hospital. We had dozens of other customers, and 100s of partners.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#625

Post by greggyb »

ndiscussion wrote: post #581
greggyb wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with many database technologies and many data professionals. I don't recall any instances offhand of technical critiques of Oracle. Pricing and business practices are a different story. Oracle the database is fantastic technology.

In my opinion, pricing is a part of the product. If one company can produce a banana for $1, and another company requires $1,000 to produce a banana, that second company is an outright failure. The banana still tastes great.

When Oracle was born, there weren't many alternatives for a high-performance and production-ready RDBMS. For a long time, Oracle was technically superior to most/all other options. That is less true now.

On the other side, if you get $10,000 of value from a banana, both vendors are viable options. If there is any reason at all preventing you from adopting the $1 banana, you're still better off buying the $1,000 banana than you are scorning it for its price.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#627

Post by closeparen »

StavrosK wrote: post #426
closeparen wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your next laptop, car, etc. try doing what you think the government ought to do here. Write down the requirements, give them to a neutral third party who doesn’t doesn’t use computers/drive, and ask them to figure out the cheapest thing that meets the requirements. Commit yourself to buying only that. See how it goes for you.

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?

Procurement teams are not the ones doing the work, they are centralized bureaucratic functions to which requests go in and products come out. They have a habit of buying stuff that actual practitioners would never buy: inappropriate to the use case, known poor quality, off-brand knockoff of something practitioners actually like, etc. Any latitude in the requirements will be used in the dumbest possible way. There’s a whole cottage industry of products for government that meet naively written specs but are actually crap.

Imagine hiring web developers with only HR on the interview loop, no manager or team rounds.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#628

Post by tekkk »

martin-t wrote: post #619

Incompetence 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 plo…

I agree with your point but i would also want to point out this has been a problem since the dawn of man. Governments and organizations have been plagued by unending bureucracy and corruption that grows worse the longer it has been in existence. Humans have a tendency to protect their belongings or ego more than altruistically help others so it makes sense.

Democracy has, as a general idea, been a way to solve this problem by creating a counterbalance that should prevent important decisionmakers from being overly selfish and at least show they are being effective and altruistic. But that system isnt really applicable for smale scale power dynamics. Unless efficiency, or in some cases having just common sense, is not monitored by anyone aka. there are no consequences for making poor decisions sooner or later no one will pay attention and they will be doing whatever they _think_ is best (or easiest) but without reality checks.

But how to evaluate performance when dealing with abstract things? At least in the case of GoT the ratings did deteriorate so one could point out a problem in the system (albeit way too late, IMO s6 was when it should have been fixed). In other cases no one can see the damage they are doing (especially if they have never been really doing anything) so how to even tell it needs to be fixed? I think best cure to this problem is a great culture where being efficient is praised and rewarded. But changing already terrible culture, well, that's tough...

(Interesting film on this matter is Ikiru by Kurosawa)

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#629

Post by ineedasername »

quickthrowman wrote: post #584
ineedasername wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract. The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

> it reads a bit like any government contract. I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems lik…

It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it.

I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1].

Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation.

Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi...

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#630

Post by silexia »

martincolorado wrote: post #609
zaroth wrote: post #115

> 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…

This right here “configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform.” Because it is so difficult to launch a project and provision the requisite infrastructure in the federal government due to various IT regs and laws and subsequently obtain an Authorization To Operate (ATO) in a timely fashion an existing platform is routinely sole sourced especially when speed is neces…

Government will always be very inefficient. Government certainly has some strong benefits, but you should avoid using government wherever it is not absolutely necessary. Private industry would have done a far better job of handling the vaccine roll out.
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