Saturday, November 16, 2013

"Health-care Web site’s lead contractor employs executives from troubled IT company"

"The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show."
More than 100 former AMS employees are now senior executives or consultants working for CGI [the company that built the ACA Website] in the Washington area.
In 1997, AMS signed a $30 million contract to update the board’s archaic computer system. Four years later, with projected costs rising to $90 million, AMS was terminated. The company never delivered a workable system, according to a report by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

“The code failed system tests, and attempts to fix the errors caused further delays and increased costs,’’ said the report, which also faulted the thrift board for insufficient oversight. It was one of three reviews that criticized AMS for substandard work, along with reports by the Defense Contract Management Agency and a private firm, Integrated Benefit Solutions, hired by the thrift board to review the project.

“They couldn’t fix the problems because they didn’t know how,’’ said Stiffler, the board official, who brought in a backup contractor that completed the job on time and within budget — after throwing out more than 95 percent of AMS’s software code and rewriting the rest.
Washington Post

38 comments:

virgil xenophon said...

Why, oh why am I not surprised?

sigh..

AllenS said...

This is but one example of why we have such a huge yearly deficit and an every mounting debt.

Unknown said...

Wasting money is a tradition in DC and especially among democrats. Why stop now? Just ignore it and blindly worship your king.

Shouting Thomas said...

The culprit is, undoubtedly, "Diversity" hiring, i.e., crony hiring.

Incompetence has been slowly corrupting even the hard tech positions for decades as the Diversity con artists fill their pockets.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I remember asking this question over and over during the Obamacare debate.

Why would we want the federal government managing health care?

When they have proved to be so inept at so many things?

Shouting Thomas said...

Next steps for the Diversity con artists:

- Reparations
- Hard quotas (20% of all government jobs to blacks)

Prepare for Rwandan style incompetence and corruption to slowly undermine everything.

Shouting Thomas said...

Or, maybe, not so slowly!

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

"Boy, we're lucky Palin wasn't in charge of the Healthcare Rollout cuz it mighta gone poorly, huh!"

Dennis Miller.

Shouting Thomas said...

The manager of every tech project in the government sector is a "Diversity" hire, who doesn't have a clue what he/she is doing.

That person is making decisions on what tech to employ, then issuing an edict to the programmers and designers that they must execute his/her idiotic decisions.

Shouting Thomas said...

That incompetent manager sits backs and observes the project falling apart, and concludes that:

- Those fucking white tech guys are deliberately undermining this project because they don't respect me! After all, they are getting surly and grumbling over something or other.

- Racism is the problem!

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Notice how the press is now falling over themselves to cover the results of a debacle they should have been covering 4 years ago.

In my opinion, they are also partly to blame for this.

They failed miserably.

That Obama lie could have been checked by reading the dammed thing.

When it wasn't checked, Obama figured I'm getting a pass, repeated it ad nauseum.

Trying to help their guy in the White House, they helped doom him.

There are lessons there for them to learn but I doubt they will even pick up on it.

Shouting Thomas said...

Uh, Lem, read my comments above.

The same process applies to the press.

Competence is being deliberately driven out of every sector of the economy.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

They dismissed the "death panels" but they didn't even check "if you like your plan..."

ricpic said...

The Wookie's BFF was married to the guy that headed up this outfit. You wanted historic, America? You're getting it, hard.

Aridog said...

I will repeat what I've said before. The federal government did not manage the PPACA database build, they contracted it out...to a run of the mill "defense contractor" named CGI-Federal, wholly owned by CGI Group-Canada. IT work has to be contracted out because examination under OMB Circular A-76 determines IT work to be inherently non-governmental, so bare minimum oversight is federal. IT folk from DC who fail at one gig just move on to another gig, just like politicians become lobbyists. Congress and Executive Branch generally love the A-76 provisions ... best pork farm there evah wuz!

Defense contractors are frequently used for IT work because they usually have big fat ID/IQ contracts that virtually anything can be tacked on to no bid. How the hell else did General
Dynamics get the Obamacare "call center" contract, eh?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

List of 27 Democrats who repeated the Obamacare lie

Eric the Fruit Bat said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Eric the Fruit Bat said...

I'll bet those executive guys interviewed really well.

edutcher said...

This is why the IRS does all its software inhouse.

Shouting Thomas said...

The culprit is, undoubtedly, "Diversity" hiring, i.e., crony hiring.

Moochelle's best bud at Princeton IIRC.

The manager of every tech project in the government sector is a "Diversity" hire, who doesn't have a clue what he/she is doing.

We had a guy bucking real hard for a managerial position in the unit.

Somebody finally had to take him aside and tell him it was a pipe dream because he didn't wear a skirt.

(insert punchline)

Unknown said...

The List- excellent Lem. Thanks.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Competence is being deliberately driven out of every sector of the economy.

Including those debased by the man who made this comment and was undoubtedly fired from them.

Anyways, isn't the guy's name the same as the one with the hot mom in American Pie?

Shouting Thomas said...

@Ritmo

Don't worry.

Your side isn't in any danger of running short of graft soon.

They're "helping people." Just like you want to help.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

One thing that's always worthwhile to figure out is where someone's bias comes from.

I mean, as unhinged and therefore wobbly as all your opinions are, you're generally not worth listening to at all. But the many jobs from which you've obviously been fired make it likely that you're just resentful of other people receiving care that you used to make money providing, until your employers found out how bad at it (or just plain bad at getting along with people) you were.

Seriously, T. You have an employability and "getting along with people" problem, and that's a liability for finding work in just about any industry.

Why not work on yourself instead. Heal yourself and maybe you won't resent all the success that might exist anywhere around or even near you.

At some point, all that resentment is really just a waste of life, period.

bagoh20 said...

Yea, Ritmo, please forgive me for taking so long to get around to saying this but,

Thanks for all you do, and all you have done.

Unknown said...

Keep up the pressure. Expose the corruption.

Funny how the anti-1% occupy crowd have nothing to say over the fact that mega insurance companies crawled into bed with Pelosi and Obama.

YoungHegelian said...

Big software development projects fuck up. Government & private industry both. They fuck up all the time. If someone told me that the number of large software projects in the history of the world that have come in on time & on budget is exactly zero, I would laugh & say "probably so". Betting on a project coming in on time is like buying a million dollar house because you just know in your gut that you're gonna win the lottery.

That being said just imagine what sort of an idiot (or bunch of idiots) bets their political farm on a major software project coming in on a hard deadline, a deadline that if you miss the whole world knows, that your political enemies will use to up end your whole second term, that disrupts the whole health insurance market.

The healthcare.gov debacle ranks up there with the Watergate break-in & the Bay of Pigs as self-inflicted wounds by the Executive Branch. But healthcare.gov takes the cake for the utter depths of its collective stupidity.

Shouting Thomas said...

Ritmo, you dumb fuck,

My skills remain in demand even in retirement. I reject jobs every day.

You are impossibly, comically stupid.

I'd suggest you read Cancer War. Solzhenitzn writes very well about dumb fucks like you.

Now, I'm busy today packing balakbayan boxes for the folks in Tacloban.

Shouting Thomas said...

That would be "Cancer Ward."

Just, Ritmo, that was a classic of asshole stupidity.

You are perfectly stupid on a scale that is difficult to achieve.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

My skills remain in demand even in retirement.

Which people skills are those? "Yelling at people on the internet all day"? "Yelling 'racist' at every non-white person I encounter?"

I reject jobs every day.

Yes. You reject them through your inability to enter a workplace without a huge, visible grudge on your shoulder toward anything and everything. You reject them through your sociopathic sneering. You reject them through your inability to know how to get along with anyone and the way you see every interaction through the lens of your incestuous childhood relationships.

Unknown said...

Like most leftists, they assume you and I are hopeless and substandard. In need of the government tit.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

It's hard to stay on topic better than an obsessive crank who steers even the simplest conversation on an IT management issue to RACE!!! The MISSING MOTIVE AND REASON IN EVERY COMPUTER ENGINEERING PROBLEM!

Did you even bother to enumerate how many blacks work in or for AMS before deciding which of them performed the gremlin-like task of tanking the project, or did your brain just revert to crank mode and decide that every white engineer and manager at AMS who wasn't wearing your very own tinfoil hat received warm and fuzzy "embrace the nice diversity and ignore the failure" signals that your own powerful brainstem was protected from?

Wisconsin Republican Alliance said...

Yes! I too notice that there are little black gremlins inside my fancy doo-hickey computer machine that make it whirl and fizz and go "snap!" "crackle!" and sometimes "pop!".

Get those black gremlins! They're worse than leprechauns!

Shouting Thomas said...

The "people problem" thing is an old favorite of high school principals and HR hags, Ritmo, which should tell you something about where you rank intellectually.

My small town high school principal liked to pull that one out with every bad boy he dragged down to the office.

A few years after I left high school, the principal pulled his car into his garage, shut the door, left the engine running and committed suicide.

Your recitation of that old chestnut had me laughing. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people cheered and laughed when the principal offed himself.

I can tell you like to think of yourself as having an original intellect. You're laughably stupid and laughably conventional in every imaginable way. Toady. Fart sucker. Cocksucker to authority. Ass licker.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

A few years after I left high school, the principal pulled his car into his garage, shut the door, left the engine running and committed suicide.

Well you both hailed from similar backgrounds and likely had similar influences. Or maybe this is just the kind of effect you have on people. Again, nothing to brag about but the fact that you would just shows what sort of a person you are: A completely empty, sociopathic person. Think of it - the only thing you can say about yourself tonight is that you either drove someone to suicide or use that event to make yourself seem victorious over them.

If you think that's something to write to put yourself in a positive light, you're full of shit. Go tell that story to others in the way you just told it to me and watch the repellent reaction you get.

You just don't get anything. You're the bitterest sociopath in society - and worse, you're delusional enough to believe your immorality is a form of wisdom that others should thank you for hearing.

There really aren't words to describe something that low, and I know that writing them only encourages you. So again, it's just a plain matter of you being:

1. Amoral
2. Stupid
3. Resentful
4. Anti-social

and

5. Bitterly deprived of all the normal, positive human reactions that being the opposite of those things would bring.

You're an open book that everyone just wishes you would shut.

bagoh20 said...

This is the kind of meeting of minds that gets me all teary-eyed.

Aridog said...

Uh, ah....fuck it.

Shouting Thomas said...

That was fun!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

That's what happens when Thomas gets let out of his cage.