Sunday, November 3, 2013

Four Months Ago Government IT Personnel Bragged About How Great Healthcare.Gov Was

From Greg Scandlen at John Goodman's Health Policy Blog:
Today it is impossible to get anyone involved in the ObamaCare website to say anything. Four months ago they were bragging about how brilliant they were in an interview in The Atlantic:  
“It’s fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure,” said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview. “It’s basically setting up a web server. That’s the beauty of it.”
“This is such a lean site,” said Jon Booth, head of the web and new media group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in an interview. “HHS had a blanket contract when we when awarded this. Aquilent got creative and brought people on with powerful skills, like Ed and Jessica, a designer at Teal Media, and Development Seed. Most of my team is working on this site; we have internal UX, information architects, designers, developers, and infrastructure people that stood up the cloud environment. Their collaboration is one of the high points of this process.” 
“The work that they’re doing is amazing,” said Sivak, “like how they organize their sprints and code. It’s incredible what can happen when you give a team of talented developers and managers and let them go.”
The entire article is worth reading as an example of unbridled hubris.