Disaster
not

January 11, 2014 -- Stop calling the Obamacare technology rollout a disaster! Even Obama parrots that conventional wisdom. If you're a practitioner of technology, you know that it's never like the movies, where everything new and complex works perfectly from the moment it's switched on.

The second meme, also unquestioningly accepted, is that government -- unlike private industry -- just can't seem to "do" technology (unless it's the NSA, I guess.) In fact, complex projects are complex no matter who does them, and buggy software happens in every big project, private or public.

Compounding the technical complexity was a litany of political issues that made www.healthcare.gov's specification a moving target. A difficult project becomes near-impossible when:

  • Politics dictates an unrealistic schedule, with not enough time for testing.

  • The target was moving -- they didn't even know how many (or which) states their system had to support (34, as it turned out) until quite late in the timeline.

  • The number and diversity of systems to be integrated was large -- insurance companies, state and federal databases, even the IRS -- and without standards for data exchange.

  • There were deliberate sabotage attempts by deep-pocket special interest groups whose tactics included bogus web sites to confuse and frustrate people who sought to sign up.

  • Amazingly, the project had no official budget. In an excellent article entitled How political fear was pitted against technical needs, The Washington Post says, the "...most basic reason was financial: Although the statute provided plenty of money to help states build their own insurance exchanges, it included no money for the development of a federal exchange -- and Republicans would block any funding attempts. According to one former administration official, Sebelius simply could not scrounge together enough money."

It's remarkable that it worked at all. Now, with time for testing and debugging, system performance is improving. This is actually a pretty normal technology development and release lifecycle.

This blame game is like somebody letting the air out of your tires and then calling you names because you're having trouble giving them a ride. Stop using technology as a political football, and -- ahem, Mr. Obama and everyone else -- stop calling it a disaster!

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PS -- The cartoon is by my Dad. Click it to see it full-size.