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

technologyreview.com

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

#651

Post by acdha »

silexia wrote: post #630
martincolorado wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is propaganda and you should be more critical of the people peddling it. For example, ask yourself whether Deloitte is part of the federal government or perhaps the solution to this problem isn’t simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker. The same private sector which includes Amazon and Apple also includes Comcast, not to mention Enron.

The deeper lesson is to look at incentives: where things go well, the structure encourages the outcome society wants. When they’re misaligned, you get global climate change or the American healthcare system underperforming our peers at whole number cost and stress multiples.

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

#652

Post by mpfundstein »

colechristensen wrote: post #587
mpfundstein wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the prob? Its money changing hands. It flows from the Corp down to developers, managers, etc. also it is good that corps and governments try to innovate and spend money on it. Can it be more efficient? Always(!) Can it be more focused? Sure. But a big innovation takes a lot of factors to be well balanced and that alone is often not guaranteed nor possible given the circumstances. You just might not find the kin…

What's the problem? People spending their lives pushing a boulder up a hill. People paying taxes to pay for people pushing boulders up hills. The problem is wasting human life on wildly inefficient endeavors.

people get paid doing this. would you rather have they don't have a job because all of a sudden managers realizie that 90% of what they do is bullshit?

because that's what you will get!

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

#653

Post by stevegalla »

ethbr0 wrote: post #539
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though mostly about ladder climbing and relationship drama, the show 'House of Lies' has some really good scenes where the management consultants do actual work, which is pretty much portrayed as doing the things you've listed. Even as a fictional show, it made it easier for me to understand these situations and not get so flustered when encountering them.

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate. Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

How do tech consultants approach their work?

I am definitely biased by my past experiences with tech consultants. I’m trying to sort out if it’s a service provider issue or if it’s a customer side issue.

From my limited perspective, it seems management consultants are focused on 80/20 solution approaches. While it seems technical consultants are focused on delivering MVPs that don’t seem to map well to the business space.

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

#654

Post by Aeolun »

headmelted wrote: post #549
Aeolun wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years. Exactly! If you’ve been doing that for 20 years I do not want to work with you, since you are apparently perfectly content with that status quo. I’ve been doing it for two years and it’s already too much. My highest prio…

I’m glad you’ve clarified as when you said that it sounded like you’re astonished at the level of apathy and/or incompetence you’re surrounded with and I was worried for a second that you’ve just too little experience to understand that your predecessors have very likely been trying for much of that time to push back against the status quo and have better ideas implemented, likely swimming upstream against resistance…

Is it just me, or are you being needlessly sarcastic here?

The resistance is ridiculous, but it’s still the single most valuable thing we can be doing to improve our project delivery.

Given the current division of people that care/not care (or are disinclined to act on it?). It is entirely likely that none of my predecessors did.

That said, if they had been doing it (and made any progress), I really wonder what the previous situation was. Maybe there just weren’t any requirements at all?

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

#655

Post by Aeolun »

ethbr0 wrote: post #537
Aeolun wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, this sounds like someone having a hard time saying you should apply the money sent to the entire balance.

Nope. That's pretty much what the specs (written by outsourced consultants) said. In reality, there's one edge case where things needs to be applied in a different, distinct, and very specific order, otherwise (legal consequences).

Yeah, this is probably just my lack of context around the subject.

That said, if I get requirements like that I always have a strong feeling the case can be generalized. Laws generally aren’t as specific as that.

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

#656

Post by davemp »

flurben wrote: post #550
dopylitty wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms…

The public sector has a whole layer of complexity that doesn't exist at all (edit: as much) in the private sector, and I can promise you it frequently does NOT feel good at all. It is difficult to explain but people tend to use the word "bureaucracy" as a catch-all for several dozen discrete problems that crop up in different combinations depending on what level of govt you're operating. Typical examples might be : -…

I’ve experienced a few of those situations. Absolutely soul crushing, the only feasible move is to run as fast as possible.

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

#657

Post by aweiland »

petarb wrote: post #320
canofbars wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because governments outsource everything possible and end up with no persistent talent that really understands whats going on so you end up spending all the money on interfacing with contractors.

What if the government had an internal technology division to build things like this

They can't afford to get the talent on the GS schedule.

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

#658

Post by ethbr0 »

stevegalla wrote: post #653
ethbr0 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate. Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

How do tech consultants approach their work? I am definitely biased by my past experiences with tech consultants. I’m trying to sort out if it’s a service provider issue or if it’s a customer side issue. From my limited perspective, it seems management consultants are focused on 80/20 solution approaches. While it seems technical consultants are focused on delivering MVPs that don’t seem to map well to the business s…

The disincentive that tech consulting has is that jobs (at least in my area) were usually bid at fixed price.

I have no idea if that's the way larger firms do it (would expect not).

Consequently, profit = contract price - consultant hours. Every bad happened from minimizing the latter.

Even if you do straight up billable hours with the client, your time was typically scheduled 1-2 projects in advance. This lead to being prematurely (in terms of things being "done") rolled off a project, onto a new one, and finishing / supporting the first from your hotel after-hours.

This was in a pretty cowboy area. I imagine different parts of technical consulting behave differently.

But yes, MVP quality code seems to be a constant. I saw that delivered from a top-tier technical consulting firm (ML solution) to a T100 customer.

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

#659

Post by ethbr0 »

eaton wrote: post #632
ethbr0 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate. Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

Heh. That stuff has always felt like an inexplicably weird trope, like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles. After 8 hours in a windowless conference room with a parade of stakeholders, making RACI matrices on a stained whiteboard and scarfing down cafeteria sandwiches during "bio-break," I want to _talk to my wife on the phone then stare blankly at the ceiling_, not go out for a…

laughs Agreed. The most interest thing I tended to do was "What looks like a good restaurant in this area?"

... did get really good at reading between the lines of Yelp / maps reviews. (Objectively, friends have since commented on it)

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

#660

Post by pauljurczak »

moritonal wrote: post #460
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?

If I asked our procurement team to get me a distributed version-control software to use I'd be given a site-wide license of Perforce before being given git. So enevitably requirements are tailored to what I want. It seems someone wanted Deloitte, why (and how expensive was the dinner) is another question.

Do you think one expensive dinner was all it took? ;-)
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