3 years and an expected cost of half-a-trillion dollars ($638.81 million). And there you have it, Healthcare.gov. If ever there was a website that was going to be met with more scrutiny than an anal probe, this one is the front runner. Since the October 1 launch, the site has been fraught with issues resulting in a bug list that undoubtedly makes a Q/A want to curl up into the fetal position and wish they were considered “non-essential.”
Okay, I know. It’s a government site. That’s the first problem. According to dobt.com (Department of Better Technology) in a blog post “How Healtcare.gov Went Wrong“, there are a multitude of issues within the procurement process which have compounded the creation, development and launch of such a massive website. To begin with:
A High-Friction, High-Overhead contracting process: There was no competition for the Healthcare.gov contract. The Dept of Health and Human Services used an existing contract it already had with CGI Federal. (Which BTW, is the same company that built the portal for Massachusett’s “Romneycare”; you’d think they’d know what the hell they were doing already.) The contract was “greased”, meaning reduced friction. The normal procurement process would have taken about 18 mos, so in an effort to save time the government opted to take a contract they already had.
Requirements Written By People Who Don’t Understand Technology or Procurement: If you want (an IT project) to be a total disaster, let Congress design the requirements and set the deadlines. Enough said.
Building a Battleship like a Website: The process leans toward a write-down-all-the-requirements-then-build-to-those-requirements type of methodology–which makes sense if you’re building a space shuttle or a battleship. But this methodology doesn’t work when it comes to building a website, especially one over 3 years, where tools and techniques are bound to advance.
Lack of Pricing and Availability: In a functional, real-world marketplace, companies that do a good job at low cost will grow. Those that don’t will shrink. In the federal IT marketplace this isn’t how it works for two reasons: the federal government doesn’t know how much stuff should cost and doesn’t do a good job sharing performance-based information. The fed will track contractor performance based on misconduct, but not poor performance. And they don’t track pricing information.
Inappropriate relationships between Congress and Contractors: Contractors can lobby the federal government, and CGI Group, Inc lobbied the fed on the Affordable Care Act though there’s little data on what or why they lobbied. Still, it’s a question of ethics and the procurement process.
Pile all this on top of what appears to be a site that was never run through load testing, user testing, accessibility reviews, browser support and optimization, well then no wonder. People familiar with using the web expect things to work, and when they don’t, it damages the brand and perceived value of the website or experience they’re visiting. Unfortunately, this isn’t some bloated internal database that only government employees will have to suffer through. (The first page of the registration process (once you get to it) has 2,099 lines of HTML code, but it also calls 56 JavaScript files and 11 CSS files.)
This is a website For The People.
ittybittyusability 