{"id":22674,"date":"2013-10-25T00:02:39","date_gmt":"2013-10-25T05:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22674"},"modified":"2014-01-13T13:14:55","modified_gmt":"2014-01-13T18:14:55","slug":"the-glamour-of-big-it-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/25\/the-glamour-of-big-it-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"The glamour of big IT projects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2013-10-24\/obamacare-s-virtual-fantasy-couldn-t-handle-messy-reality.html\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> on the hubris of the Obamacare project team:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The HealthCare.gov website is a disaster &mdash; symbolic to Obamacare opponents, disheartening to supporters, and incredibly frustrating to people who just need to buy insurance. Some computer experts are saying the only way to save the system is to scrap the current bloated code and start over.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back, it seems crazy that neither the Barack Obama administration nor the public was prepared for the startup difficulties. There\u2019s no shortage of database experts willing to opine on the complexities of the problem. Plenty of companies have nightmarish stories to tell about much simpler software projects. And reporting by the <em>New York Times<\/em> finds that the people involved with the system knew months ago that it was in serious trouble. \u201cWe foresee a train wreck,\u201d one said back in February. <\/p>\n<p>So why didn\u2019t the administration realize that integrating a bunch of incompatible government databases into a seamless system with an interface just about anyone could understand was a really, really hard problem? Why was even the president seemingly taken by surprise when the system didn\u2019t work like it might in the movies?<\/p>\n<p>We have become seduced by computer glamour.<\/p>\n<p>Whether it\u2019s a television detective instantly checking a database of fingerprints or the ease of Amazon.com\u2019s \u201c1-Click\u201d button, we imagine that software is a kind of magic &mdash; all the more so if it\u2019s software we\u2019ve never actually experienced. We expect it to be effortless. We don\u2019t think about how it got there or what its limitations might be. Instead of imagining future technologies as works in progress, improving over time, we picture them as perfect from day one. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virginia Postrel on the hubris of the Obamacare project team: The HealthCare.gov website is a disaster &mdash; symbolic to Obamacare opponents, disheartening to supporters, and incredibly frustrating to people who just need to buy insurance. Some computer experts are saying the only way to save the system is to scrap the current bloated code and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,15,13],"tags":[140,943,121,937,92],"class_list":["post-22674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-technology","category-usa","tag-design","tag-glamour","tag-insurance","tag-obamacare","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5TI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22674"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22676,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22674\/revisions\/22676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}