"Oracle vice president Tom Budnar told the board that his firm had brought in additional people, including a "swat team" to ensure the site should be able to enroll people by the end of December."
This is a vice president at a software company?
This is a vice president at a software company?
This is a vice president at Oracle.
[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/index.ht...
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?orig=TSEO_SN&company=oracl...
[3] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/oregonhix/meetings/transc...
If the current batch of people can't get the job done, replacing them is reasonable.
I can just picture in my head a developer requesting an RESTful API for simple data interchange and the current owner of the legacy system they're asking about being 1) clueless, 2) hamstrung, or 3) actively impeding progress. Repeat this song and dance ad infinitum over the course of the project and you end up with a complex system designed to work in the specific use case of the conference room pilot prior to go-live ... but which will fail everything else.
Looks like your Mr King sort of skimmed the book.
(From the UK: land of the millions of pound software failures)
PS: Oracle isn't the government people
No matter how you feel about Obamacare I think it's had an effect I certainly never would have predicted: At this point it's become kind of an indictment of the software industry, whether deserved or undeserved. It seems like every news story ends up insinuating that devs are incompetent.
As for incompetent developers, I don't know if the public thinks that at all. I think the standard public response is the usual gov't bureaucracy getting in the way. States communicating with multiple Fed departments has got to be daunting. And if one of those isn't online and working properly or changes requirements midway through you've got some problems.
I hope this is finally the kick in the pants that the government needs to fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the government IT procurement process.