Discussion for article #226214
Yeah, I am sure that is really going to help them out with future business.
I mean, doesnât everyone want to do business with a contractor that completely fails in the project and then turns around and sues you for daring to point out their failures?
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Ripping on a company that spent $130M to build a horrible web site is not slander, it is a public service to prevent them from ripping off someone else in the future.
I canât believe it was Oracle that built this fiasco. From the headline, I figured it was some random company.
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A mega-corporation creates a product that never works and then sues Oregonians to pay for it. This is a perfect example of 1% entitlement thinking.
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If all companies that fail to deliver working products sued there would be quite a backlog. Most companies that fail STFU.
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Deflection will not save you. You effed up, take your medicine.
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From here in Orygun Iâve watched this debacle unfold for the past year.
Oracle was contracted to do the work,and they did shitty work delivering no usable deliverable.
For the states part they declined recommendations that they hire a separate company to provide program management and oversight of the project. There was open disagreement and infighting between the Cover Oregon IT staff and the State Department of Health IT staff. While the turf battles played went unabated Oracle requested and was awarded budget increase after budget increase as they burned though millions of dollars.
Now, I voted for John Kitzhaber each and every time he has run for governor and, due to a typically wingnutian GOTP candidate Iâll vote for him again. But Kitz, a Doctor, was completely AWOL in having oversight of this damned important project as part of his governing agenda everyone is scratching our heads wondering WTF?
There is plenty of blame to spread around in this little goat rodeo. All of the department heads have been fired and the IT manager hired from California who made the decision to hire Oracle (she was pretty much in bed with them in CA.) has slithered back down to CA.
Meanwhile we are scrapping the website and going on the federal exchange.
Oregon was and has been a leader in providing healthcare to our citizens. So this debacle is rightly a black eye and embarrassment to the state.
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I like the implication that criticism by public officials is a legitimate reason to stop working to fulfill contract for which youâve been paid. Did they sneak some special clause in like the company who âfinedâ someone thousands of dollars for a negative review?
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What I cannot figure out is why Oracle was tapped for the job. The exchanges are web applications. While Oracle has fine products, they donât do web apps, although their products can and do back end web apps. And none of the companies that did the healthcare.gov site had any experience either.
They didnât use the proper tools and methodologies. I can pretty much guarantee nobody involved had even heard of Agile development. Healthcare.gov was done with the waterfall model. At best.
You can get away with that on a small project. But when you get to dozens of programmers, not to mention hundreds you are setting yourself up for failure. At best it is late and over budget.
Itâs common for IT and other contractors to write up their âprotests because they lostâ simultaneously with their contract proposals. The thing that evens the battle ground is that most contracts allow the Contracting Officer to cancel a contract âfor causeâ if, after having given the contractor more time than they deserved and more chances to FIX it than it deserved, they donât. Oracle should shut up: they arenât the only game in town.
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I have run into Oracle in many different forms during my years of consulting in IT. And the story of them sending in someone to sleep with the client is not a new one. I wonât go as far as to say its the MO, but I have seen it enough that it doesnât surprise me in the least.
I remember one of my first gigs, where I was trying to get my company at the time to move off of a ADP mini computer onto a distributed system, and Oracle came in to make their pitch. They had this saleswoman with them that I had never met or heard of before, yet she gave the entire presentation. First thing she did after being shown the presentation room is to unbutton the top three buttons on her blouse and proceed to bend down at the knees to get something out of her bag every time an executive came into the room. Then for the entire presentation, she kept sliding her fingers up and down the overheard projector like she was giving it a hand job.
Afterwards I was talking to some of the people I HAD been speaking with. Their reply? âYeah, she gives great presentation. Thatâs the only reason we bring her inâ
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Agreed. My partner and I were dismayed at the failure of the website, to say the least. We figured that with JK as Governor, the Cover Oregon development and website would be a national model for success. Naive? I guess I have come to expect more from my state. Now, the black eye has been extended as the mess works through the courts. On a personal note, I did manage to acquire a very good health insurance policy via fax and phone interaction with the Cover Oregon staff, who I found to be knowledgeable and very helpful.
Oracle, like many big software concerns, has their own consulting branch. Its always a weird relationship, as they compete with the other independent consulting firms. I have seen other software concerns for example, steal away an opportunity from smaller indies because they felt âthey can do it betterâ (translation: just way too much money on the table and the indy is small enough we can afford to piss them off for this).
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Is this guy republicon cause there the oneâs who FUBAR things up then whine and point there fingers and blame everone else for there screw ups
Iâm not saying there is no fee structure that would induce me to draft a complaint that is this shameless. Iâm just saying it would be really, really high.
Actually, it seems to be the norm in big failed IT projects. The vendor claims it was due to shifting and contradictory change orders during the project, demands for features outside the scope of the RFP that the vendor told them would delay the project and undisclosed and unforeseeable incompatibilities with existing hardware and software platforms they were required to integrate, and itâs all the fault of the customerâs clueless project managers, so, the money, byitch.
I havenât really read the complaint yet, just the description, but Iâm guessing thatâs what it says.
âŚexcept that I believe Oracle held on to the project management reigns on this one. So all those problems (which btw, are very real in most big projectsâŚand become bigger and harder to manage the more politicized the project), they own.
If I were to take a wild guess, I suspect that change management was probably one of the first things out the window, right after risk management and mitigation strategies. The only people who are typically concerned with change management are the PMs. There is usually pressure from the vendorâs management to just brush past it becauseâŚmore billable hours. And of course the customer always wants to by pass change management.
One of many reasons that good project managers usually arenât wildly popular.
Redefining âchutzpahâ
sell your expertise to earn a contract, fail to build the functioning web site you contracted to build, claim that itâs the stateâs fault for not policing you, then after being paid $130 million, sue for the $23 the state held back for a website that still does not work.
As to slander, isnât truth a defense? It didnât work, it still doesnât work and probably it will never work. Unfortunately, it seems as though Oracle will prevail in any lawsuit, due to the contract language. One more example of corporate rule.
I will never understand why people believe the creators of new system when they say they will work. My first experience with this was in the 1980s when a 125 year old company I worked for ended up in bankruptcy because of a failed claims system. Two people in this small company died as a result of the stress and 200 people were out of a job.
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I have had extensive personal experience with Oracle Consulting (the group that actually does their implementations) and have found their quality and skills have deteriorated badly over the last 20 years to the point that they are worse than useless.
They only have one goal for any implementation: MAXIMUM BILLABLE HOURS and NO UNPAID SUPPORT.
Their project managers are nearly useless and donât know their own products, their âexpertsâ are only available on the phone from India on THEIR time schedule (and their facilities there are so bad you canât hear them half the time and canât understand their accents the other half.) And the kids they fly in on H-1B visas to do the local work are rotated out so fast that you are CONSTANTLY re-training the new guy/gal to âget them up to speedâ on the project. (I donât blame them, they are just trying to do the best they can under terrible managment dictums.)
The code they produce is so cut-n-paste from training materials it frequently contains the original comments from the teaching points.
Now, I know how badly a big project can be screwed up by the customer constantly changing the specs, the timelines, and the features, but really. Oracle suing to clear itâs âgoodâ name? Please. It destroyed that on itâs own years ago when Larry Ellison became a fanatical money-grubbing a-hole (to be fair, he was ALWAYS an a-hole). Just look at the people he has hired to be his VPâs. The âCustomerâ is only there to perform a complete âcash-ectomyâ upon and if they want something that is not the âOracle Wayâ they will flatly ignore you.
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Transference of the blame from Oracle. What about the reputation of the state and Kitzhaber along with those who fell for their sales pitch. If there is embarrassment it should be on Oracle along with a sincere apology to the Oregonians whose insurance process was f***ed up. I thought at the time, another Republican company who wants the ACA to fail. Iâm not even convinced that wasnât the case with the national site.