> For example, the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs spent $1.3 billion on a program to build an electronic health-records database and abruptly stopped the project in 2013 after it failed to progress as planned. More staggering? In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures, meaning they didn't meet their budget, timeline, or user expectations.
If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.
> A lot of the work we did last year for retooling the Healthcare.gov application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. Instead of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the new Healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based on your replies.
Jesus. You'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense required to design an application of this level of importance.
> The newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring, but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?
Obviously. You'd almost have to be trying to screw it up as bad as the original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.
> If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.
While $1.3 billion is a massive amount of money to spend on a project, the article summarizing that effort as being "an electronic health-records database" is incredibly trite. This characterization implies "some RDBMS someplace that holds the information." The scope of trying to bring all parties involved into a set of computer systems collaborating in workflows which would make Descartes[1] blush is immense.
Stating that the tens of thousands of people working on that effort are "riding the gravy train for decades" is naive at best.
Sorry but as someone with many decades of experience with various levels of self-interest and corruption, I don't buy your casual "it's a hard problem" excuse.
> In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures
Would you have us believe these were all hard problems?
> > In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures
> Would you have us believe these were all hard problems?
First, the statistic the article references appear to be from a Computerworld article[1] which uses "The Standish Group" analysis. This analysis indicates a 96% failure rate for all IT programs costing more than $10 million and is not limited to "government IT programs." In other words, the article failed to meet their user expectations of due diligence in representing a pivotal metric such as this.
Second, as the size of an effort increases in personnel, of course there will be inefficiencies. Waste, self-interest, and possibly corruption as well. But you specifically used the phrase "unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train", implying ulterior motives of those organizations and discounting the difficulty involved in a healthcare records project involved two huge organizations.
I can't see things improving any until they fix the bidding process for government contractors, and that would require congress to fix it. I can't see that happening. The Congress as a whole, left or right, has an army of corporate campaign contributors that benefit from keeping the system the way it is, a labyrinthine mess only certain, usually larger or specialized, players have the time and legal expertise to navigate.
It's another problem where the folks most able to fix things are unwilling because they benefit from keeping the status quo or have no incentive to take risks. Many, many politicians in DC have private investments among contractors.
But even if all of these contractors and politicians were removed, the inertia of public sector work is immensely bad still across the government. Lack of correctly aligned funding, poor morale, and a huge body of highly invested folks that just wanted a paycheck and don't want to do more than the minimum. The attitude is very rational when change is so impossible over decades that it'd drive you insane to try to change anything of consequence. This is why I quit public sector work entirely - I care too much to spend years, decades of my life pushing a stubborn mule that's gotten complacent and has been beaten and demoralized among a lot of its life. This doesn't mean that it's like this absolutely everywhere but it is the case for almost everyone without lots of connections / credentials to get you into the actually good projects with actually good people with actually good leadership. But why should I try so hard just to have an acceptably enjoyable job when I can try a lot less in private sector and get something pretty reasonable right away?
If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.
> A lot of the work we did last year for retooling the Healthcare.gov application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. Instead of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the new Healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based on your replies.
Jesus. You'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense required to design an application of this level of importance.
> The newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring, but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?
Obviously. You'd almost have to be trying to screw it up as bad as the original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.