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Comment by LVB | Hacker News Reader

At least this pile of code turned into something, unlike my local Cover Oregon which has been killed following a $250 million outlay and still no end in sight [0].

Funny that oft-mentioned Oracle used their work with Oregon to tout how their enterprise prowess "plays an essential role in establishing Oregon as a leader in healthcare reform", but the link to the source piece is now dead [1]. I did, however, save a copy of this PR fluff when it came out in 2012, just to see how it would all pan out... [2].

[0]: http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-us-attorneys-o...

[1]: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/entarch/oeea-home...

[2]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jnt15vqdc15aopj/state-of-oregon-18...

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Almost as bad as Ontario's eHealth scandal:

> the government spent five years and $647 million on the forerunner of eHealth Ontario: the Smart Systems for Health Agency, which used 15 per cent of its $225-million annual budget on consultants despite employing 166 people with annual salaries exceeding $100,000, before the project was shut down and restarted as eHealth Ontario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EHealth_Ontario

Nothing like the massive bureaucracy of government healthcare combined with government run software.

You don't have to be a government to spend half a billion on a system that never works.

I don't see anybody claiming that you have to be.

It is generally an environment and context that can lead to resources being expended in ways that would be very unlikely to happen in more commercial settings, however.

Businesses do tend to avoid such mishaps in the first place, or at least manage to stop them earlier.

Cover Oregon was a disaster. That work should have been done by an agency here in the state. I don't understand the logic of government sometimes.

I once went out on a Tinder date with one of the IT managers for Cover Oregon (in December/January). She was a music major at Denison and apparently Oracle was vacuuming up everyone with a pulse and a BS in DC and the East Coast to manage their contractors. I guess she was doing pretty well too since she could afford to go to Sun Valley once a month from Portland. What I wonder is why couldn't Oracle find managers with more experience?

Incompetence?

I've met a lot of Tier 1 contracting consultants. Smart people, excellent communicators, well presented and great at generating ideas, but with zero problem solving experience they were no better than a fresh graduate.

You need a few seasoned professionals who have seen it all to keep the children in order. Reminds me of my year 12 chemistry teacher who was out of the class for a minute and on returning had the class evacuated within seconds. He recognised the smell of mercury vapour from a burst thermometer the second he walked in.

Are you a Oregon elector? If so, what was your logic? Did you not read the procurement notice? Did you agree with it? If you didn't agree with it, did you lodge a complaint? Or were you too lazy? Were you too lazy to even read the proposal? To read and analyze the resulting award? To read others' analyses? And if you were too lazy, how can you now complain without being a hypocrite? If you're not an Oregon elector, have you done any of these things in your state? Because I don't think an executive would be able to complain about the functioning of a corporation if they don't bother to show up at board meetings or even read the meeting minutes.

But it has all those smiling people in the pictures! What could possibly go wrong...

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