"...is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." Wait, for $240 million, isn't Oracle supposed to be managing the "complex IT project."
So sad that Oregon couldn't find something other than a soul sucking corporate behemoth.
Oracle -- the typical golf-ware. Some salesperson from Oracle played golf with the person in charge of the check book. Nobody really looked at requirements. A decision was made from above and code monkeys below in the chain got a heaping pile of shit on their lap -- "Here, use this crap, build a website that kinda does this. You have to use these tools."
They are both to blame. Well Oracle made a pretty penny, so financially they know how to do this.
I once knew an Oracle salesperson. Asked them what they thought of PostgreSQL, including the companies providing paid support for it. And the response was nobody can tough us, because we know how to sell and market our stuff to the top brass. Those at the top listen more to the salesmen like that than to their own employees. Then obviously there is kickbacks and all kinds of incentives.
While I'm sure people will have many excuses, I think you are right. $200M+ for a health insurance portal that includes zero novel technologies, algorithms, or other sources of fundamental technology uncertainty, never mind actual risk, has room for multiple crimes of fraud, bribery, and other malfeasance. There are multiple comparable projects against which to measure this one and find the outlier events.
All that said, a successful lawsuit and even criminal prosecutions won't make a significant sent in similar future cases. Governments have got to start acting like a large, collaborative, transparent monopsony, and to demand that vendors draw on and contribute to a pool of open source software, and to form consortia to audit and maintain that pool. That would be a huge benefit to the technology industry, and to taxpayers.
I am sure there were several people attached to this project who knew that decisions were being made that doomed it.
Those people may have had families or something and so weren't willing to risk their jobs in order to try to get through to the managers about how fucked the thing was.
Actually, most people don't even consider explaining to their bosses how bad things are structured. They just accept whatever box they are put in without even examining it closely. Which is a big problem. But goes back to people wanting to keep their jobs.
The thing is that structures of often so fucked, it literally puts people's jobs in jeopardy in order to fix them. For example, if a PM at one point realized that there was no actual working deliverable after X months, they probably realized it was because of some decisions a boss or another PM had made. So in order to rectify that situation, they would need to say or do something that could potentially get that person fired, or try to convince that person, either of which would mean it was likely they themselves would be fired.
Basically I think that people usually don't want to rock the boat because they are scared, and so its easy for them to say something is someone else's problem and just keep their heads down.
Comes down to politics as much as actual ability or knowledge. Hierarchies make it worse.
When you start with the decision to give millions of dollars to fucking Oracle, you can either have that boss replaced or assume the project is fucked.
An interesting description of a downside in at-will employment - reminds me of the stories about culture supposedly tying the hands of Korean pilots. People shouldn't be afraid of getting fired if they voice the truth. I bet office politics can make your work uncomfortable elsewhere too, but at least you can't be fired without a good demonstrated reason.
It isn't a matter of Oracle managing this complex IT project. There would have been at least 2 PMs (one for Oracle and one for the State), probably more with a project of this scale.
The question that I had, and continue to have, is who signed off on the deliverables? There should have been numerous deliverables along the way, with a release of funds with each signed off deliverable. In my mind, those who signed off on the deliverables (as working) are ultimately the ones responsible for it's failure..
I'm an Oregonian. (Not proud about it in this case.) My understanding is that Oregon structured a very poor contract which allows them little recourse. Further, payment and deliverables were disconnected. This lawsuit is likely just about politics.
"That kind of contract means Oracle wasn’t being paid for a working website; it was being paid for the time it spent working on the project. It would have been up to the administrator to make sure the website worked, but the state decided not to hire one, and gave itself that role."
Holy shit, I had not seen this information previously.
So it looks like Oracle (through a roundabout arrangement with Dell) was on price agreement and they entered into a time & materials contract with Oracle and paid them via POs. Jesus christ on a cracker. Now I wonder if the Legislature had to approve OHAs limitation like they did with my Agency? In other words, we had to get permission from the Legislature to spend our own money (outside of normal operating costs).
I had to budget my big IT expenses before each biennium and wrap them up into Policy Option Packages that then got presented to the Legislature to get approval to implement them. Yes, this was for things like new servers, hyper-v, etc.
What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars. That means that each PO was over 3 Million dollars (provided it was divided up evenly between each PO). Was there no chain of accountability on these POs? Who approved them? Who had oversight on this process?
"What I find utterly unfathomable is that the state wrote ONLY 43 POs totalling 132 Million fucking dollars."
Actually since you mentioned it:
"The purchase orders state that the purchase had to be split across multiple POs due to ADPICS controls. OHA explained that this was due to limitation on the authority of the OHA purchaser entering the POs into the ADPICS
procurement system."
So they had to split the POs up to get them past the business rules implemented in their accounting platform? Heh.
So reading these findings is kind of enlightening. As a former Manager with the State of Oregon, the lines about competing priorities really resonates with me. DAS (Dept. of Administrative Services) was tasked at one point with unifying IT and related services throughout the state, which basically forced them to look at the state as one entire enterprise. Good in theory, not so good in practice. I think what has proven to be true, is that each Agency has very different needs and wants with regards to IT and projects that fall into that realm.
The report goes on to mention that "the project seemed to lack a consistent, cohesive enterprise approach to managing the project." This sounds like DAS wrote this. It goes on to say, "The focus was on establishing an enterprise solution for the exchange and for the DHS Modernization project.". Again it sounds like DAS wrote this.
A key component (I think) that screwed the process was not keying vendor payment to deliverables, well and paying time & materials only. Fucking unbelievable. If I had been involved in this project, I would have gone on record in the beginning as against this setup and I would have considered it doomed to fail.
It's interesting that they put together an RFP for a Systems Integrator and during the open question process "Carolyn Lawson said that she called potential system integrators and was told that they were not interested in bidding due to the lack of clear requirements and the limited budget (the state requested $96M, but was only funded $48)" So no potential bidders would bid on this fiasco.
Having seen these contracts in action on a smaller scale, time and materials works great if there is continuous delivery. If you're not getting value for your money, you can identify it earlier and cut your losses.
If you do a firm fixed price contract, the contractor takes on all the risk and will charge a much higher price to compensate. You'll also spend a lot more time and energy on writing bulletproof contracts because the stakes are so much higher. Worse, you'll need to do contract negotiations for every requirements change.
It's possible to make either work, though. I don't think using a different contract type would have fixed the root problem here.
If someone paid your company $240M, even with shoddy oversight, knowing that the health of millions of people depends on reasonable engineering (one website), you'd deliver a decent website.
This is appalling. The fact that so many here are jaded - I'm jaded too - doesn't change the fact that if you take $240M of a customer's money, you'd deliver a website.
I agree. To companies it's just business, but I will forever view HP as a degenerate company that deserves to go bankrupt for the rapacious deal it carved out from the U.S. Navy for NMCI.[1] It's not just business for the people in government, especially those putting their lives on the line.
If Oracle can't build a website for $240M it should go bankrupt too. Who cares about people getting healthcare when we can rack up costs. Go Sales!
It depends what the contract is exactly. We all know the Oracle isn't some altruistic company who is going to take losses out of any kind of moral obligation.
Mostly unrelated, but I just met a guy last night who's working in state govt (NC). Is working in a dept and is being told he only has access to Windows servers, and is required to use IIS and SQL Server. They're already bought/paid/licensed, and he has no option. But... there's no budget to get him a licensed copy of Visual Studio. So he's been writing PHP with some free editor and cobbling it together on Windows/MSSQL.
He seemed to be unaware of Visual Studio Express options, so that's a little bit his fault (or more likely, the fault of whoever is overseeing his group).
Again, yes, unrelated to the Oracle thing, except yet one more anecdotal illustration of just how poorly run govt programs can be. I know private enterprise can be as well, but we're not having to fund those directly, and in many cases the market eventually sorts them out.
This is what things like the US Digital Service and UK GRS are trying to prevent. And I hope (with respect to State residents) that Oregon loses it's shirt over this and several key administrators.
At some point we have to accept that software is an intimate part of what we do and will be - that there is no "external supplier" for our own core identity.
Either a system and process is totally outsourced and barely even a government function (power generation) or it's intimately connected to what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)
So buck up - delivering software at scale is what life is going to be about for the next fifty years - learn that lesson now - don't blame the wolf for eating your chickens.
I just made a pull request for the US Digital Service playbook suggesting that contracts require continuous public disclosure of all disbursements of funds. If that were the case, you couldn't find out after the fact about $200 million going down the hole.
what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)
Who appointed you to speak for Americans? I don't want the government involved in or paying for or deciding who provides my healthcare. One of the reasons is I don't want it managed by the incompetence illustrated in this story.
"Medicare Beats Private Plans for Patient Satisfaction: Survey
People with individual or employer health plans paid more out of pocket, had worse access to care"
"Meanwhile, those with employer-sponsored health plans and those who bought their own insurance were nearly twice as likely to report problems with their medical bills than people with Medicare, the study found."
Medicare is funded directly by payroll deductions from the working population. Obamacare requires all citizens to purchase health insurance, regardless if they deem it as necessary.
Obamacare requires health insurance companies disburse at least 80 percent of the premiums they bring in to medical service providers for their members. This effectively turns health insurance companies into quasi-non-profit entities, very similar to Medicare (which has no profit motive).
I don't mind living in a world where you can get better healthcare if you can afford it. I do have a problem living in a world that doesn't have a minimum level of care for everyone.
You mean other than the fact that Obamacare funnels money directly in to the pockets of insurance companies that, despite your characterization of them as " quasi-non-profit entities" were, and remain, very-much-for-profit entities? That's one. There are many others.
What's your theory for why the insurance companies "volunteered" for this? Altruism?
looking at this whole thread starting with lifeisstillgood's comment ("[...] what we want from government (and yes Americans, that means healthcare)") at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214708 it would appear that you are the one trying to change the subject from affordable health care to "obamacare".
toomuchtodo said "The majority of Americans have spoken, and want affordable healthcare.", at which point you started talking about "Obamacare".
btw your attempt to incite a quarrel is funny since your statements agree with lifeisstillgood's and toomuchtodo's statements.
> He's the one that's trying to equate it with some magical, mythical "affordable healthcare" system that does not exist in real life.
Let's not lie now, shall we?
"The U.S. stands almost entirely alone among developed nations that lack universal health care."
"That brings us to another way that America is a big outlier on health care. The grey countries on this map tend to spend significantly less per capita on health care than do the green countries -- except for the U.S., where the government spends way more on health care per person than do most countries with free, universal health care. This is also true of health care costs as a share of national GDP -- in other words, how much of a country's money goes into health care."
Not only do we spend the most per capita on healthcare, we consistently deliver lower quality care than other first world countries with universal healthcare spending less than us.
I really don't care to argue with you. Obamacare/ACA is well on its way to pushing the US to universal healthcare, as it should.
Everyone is in favor of "affordable healthcare" for the same reason that everyone is in favor of good weather and world peace.
You are attempting to make "affordable healthcare" synonymous with Obamacare, which it isn't, and suggest that anyone who thinks that Obamacare is a horrible implementation must be opposed to "affordable healthcare".
It is the exact same dishonest argument that's used to shout down someone who (e.g.) thinks that the Patriot Act was a bad idea by implying that the person is in favor of terrorism.
I posted a link that showed that majority of Americans are opposed to Obamacare and always have been (multiple polls).
It got modded down. Which, of course, is even more dishonest.
But, you know, modding people down isn't actually going to make the problem go away.
>Not only do we spend the most per capita on healthcare, we consistently deliver lower quality care than other first world countries with universal healthcare spending less than us.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Obamacare is the best solution for the problem. It isn't. It combines the worst aspects of private health insurance with the worst aspects of socialized medicine, combined with massive payouts to insurance companies at taxpayer expense.
>Obamacare/ACA is well on its way to pushing the US to universal healthcare, as it should.
Obamacare is going to kill real healthcare reform in the U.S. for at least a generation. Maybe longer.
No, it's a success -- at putting money into campaign contributor pockets, and proving that "government doesn't work".
Now take something like the California death registration system (https://ca.edrs.us/edrs/secureLogin), which, since it was developed by a mere handful of state employees (on-shore, of course) on a modest budget and runs on a single Linux server, completely failed to accomplish those financial and propaganda goals for the corporate 1%-ers. :-)
If stupid, greedy, people run with the project, it's doomed whether you slap "public" or "private" on the work.
I'm curious about more information regarding this, since I'm an Oregonian. Dealing with the state for software, I can understand lack of clarity on requirements and "flip-flopping" on a weekly basis. However, based on what I've read in the past, Oracle doesn't strike me as the most benevolent of companies, nor as one which has good people in charge of software (just look at how far behind Java is to C# or other languages).
I hold out no hope. The RFP process is inherently broken and seems to revolve ONLY around preventing nepotism and with a pervasive attitude of one-size-fits-all in State government, I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I personally met some of the PMs on this towards the end -- Oracle was hiring anyone with a BS and a pulse on the East Coast to be a PM, flying them over for five nights a week and often flying them back to wherever they lived on the weekends. Technical knowledge was apparently not a criterion.
I actually saw some of it because someone forgot to disable stack traces on the production server (and their sign up form was broken when I submitted it). It was written using some PHP framework. You'd think it would be written in Java...?
It's a giant ball of Oracle product horse hair glued together with cat vomit. Want to see what that looks like? Look at any other Oracle customer's codebase. And yet the world hasn't yet plunged into the sun to end it all because of the shame.
So sad that Oregon couldn't find something other than a soul sucking corporate behemoth.