Taxpayers paid $634 million to build the digital equivalent of a rock

This may not be the worst software project disaster in history, but it is a classic example of how not to run a project. Having been associated with project disasters myself, I know how painful it is for everyone on the project because I will bet good money there have been many good people yelling, “Stop!” “Look at what you are doing!” all through this project from the very beginning.

Here is a preview of the analysis of the project by Andrew Couts on Digital Trends. This project is a classic that may have established a milestone in software history:

We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

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It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.

The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov, according to U.S. government records, appears to have been $634,320,919, which we paid to a company you probably never heard of: CGI Federal. The company originally won the contract back in 2011, but at that time, the cost was expected to run “up to” $93.7 million – still a chunk of change, but nothing near where it ended up.

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/obamacare-healthcare-gov-website-cost/

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