Why the Obamacare website was doomed

One of the most dispiriting spectacles of
the last month has been the botched
launch of HealthCare.gov , the website
created to implement President Obama's
landmark healthcare reforms. Obamacare
had a desperately turbulent passage
through Congress and survived various
wrecking attempts by the Tea Party and
their accomplices. Then the glorious day
dawned and millions of US citizens hit the
URL, hoping that, finally, they would be
able to find a health insurance plan that
they could afford.
Guess what happened. According to the
New York Times , of the 20 million people
who tried to access the site over its first
three weeks only 500,000 managed to
complete applications for health cover and
an even smaller percentage of them
actually succeeded in obtaining insurance.
In an unprecedented move, the president
had to make a public apology for the
shambles.
At this point, British readers will mutter:
"Well, at least he had the grace to
apologise." Ministers in successive British
governments of all stripes have, over the
years, presided over some IT cock-ups that
put the Obamacare one in the shade. My
guess is that upwards of £10bn has been
blown over the years in massive
government IT projects that turned out to
be death marches to cancellation. But
usually the bad news was quietly buried
and we heard about it only when the
National Audit Office lifted the stone to see
what lay beneath.
The Obamacare website fiasco has a
quaintly antique ring to it. This is the kind
of stuff that used to happen in the first
internet boom, when any clown with an
MBA and an idea for a dotcom could
attract investors. In those days, new
websites were often overwhelmed on
launch. The founders hadn't bought
enough servers to handle the surge. But
this is 2013 and those kinds of capacity
problems don't exist any more. You can
rent as many servers as you need from
Amazon's cloud, add another hundred in
an instant and pay for them on your credit
card.
So why was the Obamacare site launch
such a disaster? Writing in the New York
Times , two politically experienced geeks
argue that it's mostly down to the way the
government purchases IT services. "Much
of the problem," they write, "has to do with
the way the government buys things. The
government has to follow a code called the
Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is
more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all
but ensure that the companies that win
government contracts, like the ones put out
to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can
navigate the regulations best, but not
necessarily do the best job."
That strikes a chord over here. British civil
servants have traditionally been
technologically illiterate, so when ministers
demand a new IT system to fix some failing
that is annoying the Daily Mail , Sir
Humphrey breaks into a cold sweat. He
knows nothing about this stuff, except that
it costs a bomb and that it usually bombs.
The spectre of the National Audit Office
looms over him. He does not want another
IT disaster attached to his personnel file.
So what does he do?
Simple: he calls up the big consultancy
firms asking for tenders. These in turn call
up their chums in brain-dead firms called
"system integrators" who know only how to
do one thing, namely to build massive
integrated IT systems the way they were
built in the 1960s. And thus begins another
death march to oblivion; another project
that is billions over budget and years
behind schedule. But Sir Humphrey sleeps
easy in his bed. After all, the shambles was
approved and designed by the boffins who
understand this stuff.
The truly amazing thing about this soap
opera is that it was allowed to go on for so
long. But eventually the penny dropped:
HMG simply had to smarten up. And
smarten up it has. The Cabinet Office now
has some geeks who can spot consultancy
bullshit at 50 paces. The unit they belong to
is called the Government Digital Service . Its
brief is to build the right technology, using
modern methods and approaches, or to
employ agile computing firms that regard
£100,000 as a lot of money and that are
accustomed to delivering on time.
There are not many good news stories in
British government at the moment, but GDS
seems to be one. I first began to think that
when I heard an anecdote from a friend
who moves in these exalted circles. He
reported an overheard conversation
between a senior GDS officer and a system
integrator who had feasted for years on
government contracts. The GDS guy
outlined the new thinking. "But,"
expostulated the contractor, "this is a
completely different way of doing things."
"You know," said the civil servant, "I do
believe you're beginning to get it."
Hallelujah!