How the iPod President Crashed: Obama's Broken Technology Promise

[FarCenter]

In the 2008 election, President Obama’s advisers talked of their boss’s belief that it was time for an “iPod government.” Obama, a technology addict who tools around on his iPad before going to sleep and who fought the U.S. Secret Service bureaucracy for the right to carry a smartphone, would be the first president truly at home in the Digital Age. That put him, he thought, in a unique position to pull the federal government into the Digital Age, too. His administration wouldn’t just be competent. It would be modern. And it would restore America’s faith that the public sector could do big things well.

After Obama got to the White House he tried to deliver on the promise. He created positions for a chief information officer and a chief technology officer. He embarked on a massive effort to open up government data. He created an online dashboard to bring transparency to the government’s spending on IT. “If a project is over budget or behind schedule, this site tells you that, and by how much—and it provides the name, the e-mail, and the phone number of the person responsible,” Obama said in January 2010. “To date, the site has gotten 78 million hits.”

To Obama, this was part of the core work of rescuing the idea that government could actually solve big problems. All too often, the best efforts of talented public servants “are thwarted because the technological revolution that has transformed our society over the past two decades has yet to reach many parts of our government,” he said in that 2010 speech. “Many of these folks will tell you that their kids have better technology in their backpacks and in their bedrooms than they have at the desks at their work.”

The disastrous launch of healthcare.gov,the online portal that was supposed to be the linchpin of the Affordable Care Act, has dealt a devastating blow to Obama’s vision. In the months leading up to the Oct. 1 rollout of the site, the president rarely compared his signature policy achievement to Medicare or Social Security. Instead, he favored analogies to e-commerce sites such as Orbitz (OWW), Travelocity, and Expedia (EXPE). Obamacare was supposed to be the model for a 21st century social program, not a replica of programs built in the 20th. Now Republicans are seizing on the breakdown of the health exchange to reinforce the idea that government can’t do anything right—particularly not anything of this size. “The rollout of this law made a trip to the DMV look like a day in the park,” says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Even Obama’s allies acknowledge that the healthcare.gov debacle could do damage beyond the health-care system. “This plays into the suspicion that resides in really all Americans that, outside of narrow functions they can see and appreciate like Social Security and national parks, the government just can’t get it done,” says Austan Goolsbee, who was Obama’s top economic adviser during the 2008 campaign.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/obamas-broken-promise-of-better-government-through-technology

[ProSense]

1. Oh, it's

Obama’s problems aren’t unique. In 2005 the website for the Medicare prescription drug benefit launched three weeks late—the Bush administration initially blamed the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur for the delay—and the early months of the benefit were pure chaos. In January 2006, 54 percent of Americans told Gallup the new law wasn’t working. In February 2006, then-House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the rollout “horrendous” on Fox News Sunday. But the law survived. Today more than 90 percent of seniors approve of Medicare Part D, and Republicans regularly cite it as a model for future health-care reforms.

<...>

For all its deficiencies, healthcare.gov isn’t the worst disaster a government has experienced on a major IT project. That distinction belongs to the U.K.’s endeavor to create an electronic medical records system for its National Health Service. The effort, which began in 2002, tore through about $10 billion before the government admitted it simply couldn’t be salvaged. In an editorial at the time, the liberal Guardian newspaper declared, “The government is an inept purchaser of private services: indecisive, ponderous, overambitious, and wasteful. Mass centralisation does not reduce costs, but it kills flexibility.”

...Ezra at Bloomberg, again, playing to the RW. I mean, the site is experiencing problems like all other rollout. When fixed, it will be a massive accomplishment. Klein seems to be determined to conflate the glitches with the law, but even he know that the disastrous rollout of Medicare Part D didn't prevent it from taking hold. It's absurd.

IT Contractor: HealthCare.gov Was The First Of Its Kind

At the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight hearing Thursday on HealthCare.gov's troubled launch, an executive for one of the project's top software companies stressed to members that the insurance marketplace was a first-of-its-kind technological endeavor.

"The federal exchange ... is not a standard consumer website," Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal, a lead contractor for the site, told the committee. "Rather, it is a sophisticated technology platform that for the first time in history combines the processes of selecting and enrolling in insurance and determining eligibility for government subsidies all in one place and in real-time."

"Some consumers were able to enroll on October 1, but we acknowledge that issues arising in the federal exchange make the enrollment process difficult for too many Americans," she continued. "Consequently, CGI Federal's focus shifted to solving consumer access and navigation problems on the exchange."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/it-contractor-healthcare-gov-was-the-first-of-its-kind

As for Obama and technology, you'd think the entire five years of rollouts, from processing the Census to all the other achievements mean nothing. He also kicked ass in the campaign.

How Team Obama's tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-team-obamas-tech-efficiency-left-romney-it-in-dust/

[FarCenter]

2. A crucial difference is that the Obama campaign didn't use the government's IT procurement process

In the Business Week article it goes on to describe how the UK revised its approach to IT after the disastrous $10 billion National Health Service IT debacle. It is now much more successful in rolling out new IT services to the public.