If you aren't a US citizen, you may not have been following the slow-motion train wreck that is healthcare.gov. But you should, because it's an abject lesson in how not to do IT, procurement, and public policy. And we thought the Free State Web site was a fiasco.
Even if you haven't heard of healthcare.gov, you might have heard of Obamacare (more correctly, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", or ACA), a controversial piece of legislation central to Barack Obama's promises to tackle healthcare by making medical insurance more accessible and affordable.
Obamacare is intended to get more US citizens on to health insurance, and key to the whole scheme is the notion of online insurance exchanges, where users can evaluate policies and sign up for schemes. Healthcare.gov is the central uber-exchange for anyone not served by a state-specific exchange, for example. It's a complicated and highly charged topic, but the long and the short of it is that the healthcare.gov Web site is fundamental to the whole process.
Hi-tech fail
So you'd expect the US government would get that right. This is the same government that put men on the moon and buggies on Mars, which commands the world's most advanced and hi-tech military with the ability to enforce its will in any corner of the globe at a moment's notice, likely as not via robotic weaponry straight out of science fiction. A Web portal should be child's play, right? Right.
Well, on day one, healthcare.gov received nearly five million visits from eager Americans. And it successfully completed applications for... six people. No, not six million. Not six hundred thousand. Six.
Day two was better. On day two, the site completed applications for a much improved 242 people. And all for the bargain price of about half a billion dollars. The R47 million spent for 38 Web sites makes the Free State a paragon of frugal efficiency by comparison.
The ACA's political opponents had its predictable field day, and both the president and the VP appeared on national media apologising for the fiasco. Desperate last-minute salvage efforts have managed to get the site operational, and although it will be a political football for years, it's no longer the laughing stock of the online world.
Lessons in humility
Two questions linger: how could this happen? And what can we learn from it?
How could a country with such deep pockets, so many resources, and so much talent, bungle such a basic project? The answer is deceptively simple: the US government is trying to do 21st century business with 20th century tools. Every step of the project, from decades-old procurement practices to incomplete specifications and inadequate reporting and management... every step was an unmitigated disaster. And what's worse, it got all the way to launch without anyone telling the most powerful politician in the world that his flagship product was a flop.
This is the same government that put men on the moon and buggies on Mars.
A simple problem to describe, but a complicated one to solve: the US government is facing the stark reality that it may be simply unable to deliver modern IT services to its citizens without a drastic and deep overhaul of its internal operations and management from top to bottom. If a Web portal for buying insurance incurs such a fiasco, can you imagine how a nationwide e-voting project might have turned out?
But these are not stupid people. The US administration employs some of the best minds, the best IT strategists. Obama's social media infrastructure alone has become the stuff of legends in some circles. The fact is that healthcare.gov was a deceptively complex project, which exposed a series of weak links in the chain - the sort of ambitious and tempting project that many enterprise professionals encounter on whiteboards every day.
This was the sort of project which business, becoming dangerously attuned to the emerging mantras of agile IT, may have come to expect. And IT leaders, desperate to reaffirm themselves and their departments as innovation drivers rather than infrastructure cost centres, find themselves trapped in a Catch-22 of next-generation expectations colliding with last-generation resources and practice. Say no and you reinforce your position as a dinosaur. Say yes and, well, you could be presiding over the next healthcare.gov.
For enterprises, the fact that this comes at a time when cloud computing is front of mind is no surprise. This week, I've been visiting Microsoft's Azure data centre in Dublin, and one of the company's customers summed up matters neatly. "If you aren't ready for the cloud," he said, "you aren't ready for anything." The sort of fundamental reinvention IT departments must undertake to take advantage of cloud services has nothing to do with the cloud at all: it is no more than the basic evolution they must take to deliver the next generation of services their clients, and the market, will demand.
National governments might be able to absorb overspend and under-delivery at such an epic scale, but it can be a death blow to an organisation, and certainly to a career. If healthcare.gov can teach us one lesson, it is to look sharply at our procurement, and ask whether it is fit for purpose.
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