Interesting article.
I was a small business owner contracting directly to the US government for many years; and I can confirm that the US government procurement process is a nightmare; and because of the complexity, it is nearly impossible to get the value of an IT procurement compared to the commercial marketplace.
When you combine stacks and stacks of federal laws on top of a very political process of money being spent based on political favors, etc. it is easy to see that US federal contracting is severely broken, for the most part.
Obamacare, being the biggest political hot potato in the US at the moment, is doomed to many months of failure. There will be intense political pressure from all sides on the IT development that insure failure.
I can assure you that IT experts ate NOT in charge of the IT development and testing process.
More than likely, the people "in charge" are White House and Congressional staffers who make decisions, not based on what is the best way to develop IT; but what makes their political bosses happy.
One accurate way to summarize it would be:
Dystopian IT Development
From wikipedia:
Quote:
A dystopia is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many works, particularly in stories set in a future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,[1] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,[2] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Elements of dystopias may vary from environmental to political and social issues. Dystopian societies have culminated in a broad series of sub-genres of fiction and are often used to raise awareness of real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, spirituality, or technology that, if left unaddressed, could potentially lead to a dystopia-like condition in the future. For this reason, dystopias have taken the form of a multitude of speculations, such as pollution, poverty, societal collapse, political repression, or totalitarianism.
