MrG., from My Daily Kona sent me the following e-mail which I have edited slightly.

I am “MrG” from the “my Daily Kona” website that is on your blogroll. I have read your website for several years I guess, and you have on your older posts commented about the crappy roll-out of the ACA website and the lack of testing.

To give you a bit of a background, I am a Boy scout leader and I was talking with one of the other leaders waiting for a parade to start and that person told me a few things about healthcare.gov.Obunglercare. I was talking to another parent at my sons scout troop. This person was talking about a a major software upgrade roll out they they are worried about and I commented ” as long as your roll out works better than the Obamacare website roll-out , then y’all would be fine.” This person replied that ” My company is the one that rolled out the ACA website.”

*Oh Snap* I thought. I replied ” You work for CGI Federal?” This person nodded in the affirm. I, without thinking, immediately asked ” What happened, was there any test of the system before the roll-out?”

This person replied “There was so much bureaucratic interference in the program, all these people wanted their input into the product, but then wouldn’t make a decision and punted it to another bureaucrat who then shuffled it to another one. We had no guidance on exactly what they wanted…Just vague *suggestions*. We were stumbling around trying to do what they asked. There was no leadership or direction given. We kept changing the codes, adding things and then removing things….per their many requests, but no firm guidance. And they would not change the date of the rollout, political considerations”

I was thinking.*yep, the bureaucrat play…Duck and cover….Don’t make a decision…you might be held responsible by those above you and get demoted.* And people want the government to run your healthcare?

One of the classes I taught at IBM was a three week boot camp for IBM contract programmers. We increased their programming skills, but we also had a module on contracts. In our first class, which was a test class, we had the students get requirements for a contract from a fake customer. The contract was for giving the customer a turnkey system that the students would install and customize.

We had an actual contract manager play the customer IT manager and an actual IBM contract programmer playing his lead programmer. When it was time, four days later, to get the manager to sign the contract that the students, who had split up in groups, had drawn up, the manager would ask them to do a little add on to the contract, which involved adding a T1 line to a remote programmer. The correct answer was, “We will have to negotiate another contract for that.” The real manager, who had sat across the table from a real customer told the students, that he had fallen for this crap in the real world and it had been the difference from making a profit or losing money on the contract. In later classes, one of our senior instructors played the manager, but used the same script.

This was a fun class to teach, but gave me an insight into what I knew went on in the healthcare.gov fiasco. It’s hard to hit a moving target.

When I first arrived in Atlanta in 1985 for my new job as a large system instructor, where I taught 3081, 3084, (top of the line mainframes) and mass storage (an IBM tape library system that made me a lot of money when I was a Customer Engineer trained on it) IBM had just signed a contract to upgrade the FAA computer system. Many of our instructors were promoted to take on project manager jobs on this project. This was my first glimpse in how gummint contracts worked.

I remember when I was a CE in St. Louis and had to take a few callouts at the Army Records Center, I was shocked at how old their equipment was. They were still using an old 360 mainframe. Of course, their 1403 printers were ancient. This was because the gummint bought their technology and as the result of the way contracting was done, they bought obsolete equipment. So it was with the FAA project.

When I first got to Atlanta, we were were teaching the 3090 processor which was still not general availability. That happened shortly after I got there. The FAA was gonna use 3083 processors since they were state of the art when the contracts were being drawn up. By the time everything had been approved, the processors were being installed, the 308x product line was downlevel and the next generation processors, the 3090’s were now top of the line. So, the FAA project was not using the latest and greatest. By the time all of the systems were online and working, the next generation processors after the 3090, were close to being launched.

Since the gummint buys rather than leasing technology, by the time the contracts are approved and the hardware is installed, they are only a few years away from being obsolete. That’s how fast things work in the IT industry.

I also knew that due to the gummint bueaucracy, requirements would change on a daily basis and dealing with the gummint bureaucracy would be like trying to nail Jello to a wall. As we have watched the rollout, my friend Cindy told me, “This is working just as you predicted.” Of course it has. To make this work, you need to have the requirements set in stone. You can’t continue to move the goal posts and expect everything to work. Of course when you have an administration that won’t take any responsibility for any of its actions from the top to the bottom with nobody willing to make a decision, a project is doomed to fail.

The legislation sucked. In a hurry to pass a bill, the Dimocrats rammed through a bill that no one read, using legislative tricks, with not a single Republican voting for it. It should be no surprise that the implementation of Obummercare would be a train wreck. This is what you get with one party rule. This is what you get when you elect someone, on the basis of skin color, with no legislative or executive experience. So we proved we weren’t racist, even though Obumbler supporters still claim we are. The country elected an incompetent racist buffoon, whose only skill is reading a TelePrompTer, not once, but twice to prove we weren’t racist.

This is what happens when affirmative action meets the Peter Principle. I saw it happen a few times at IBM. We are now seeing it writ large and all of us are paying the price.

Elections have consequences. We’re doomed!