What a techie says about the diagram below
jec.senate.gov
WHY THE OBAMACARE ROLLOUT WAS A DISASTER
Powerline ^ | October 27,2013 | JOHN HINDERAKER
Posted on Sun Oct 27 19:39:32 2013 by Hojczyk
Software expert Dan Weber, in a comment on Marginal Revolution, offers an exceptionally cogent technical explanation of the failure of the Obamacare launch:
The real problems are with the back end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS.
They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of these queries fails, the whole transaction fails.
Most of these systems are old legacy systems with their own unique data formats. Some have been around since the 1960's, and the people who wrote the code that runs on them are long gone. If one of these old crappy systems takes too long to respond, the transaction times out.
Failure isn’t rare for government IT projects – it’s the norm. Over 90% of them fail to deliver on time and on budget. But more frighteningly, over 40% of them fail absolutely and are never delivered. This is because the core requirements for a successful project – solid up-front analysis and requirements, tight control over requirements changes, and clear coordination of responsibility with accountability, are all things that government tends to be very poor at. |
