Glenn Reynolds:
The Obamacare rollout remains a debacle, but now enough time has passed that smart people are beginning to dissect what went wrong. So far, the best take I’ve seen comes from Internet pioneerClay Shirky, who notes that the politicians weren’t listening to the people doing the actual work.
I was talking about this to my Administrative Law class not long ago. I had told them that there are few real secrets in D.C. because everyone sleeps with everyone else. A student then asked why both the administration and the GOP seemed to have been blindsided by the Obamacare website problems. “I guess nobody was sleeping with the techies,” was my response.
Shirky leaves out sex as an explanation — always a mistake where Washington is concerned — but he does focus on communication, and on the problems with having big tech programs run by people who don’t actually understand the technology.
Shirky comments:
Intoning ‘Failure is not an option’ will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no ‘Suddenly Go Faster’ button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks. Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long [as] politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.
He’s right about that. Having been involved with (much) smaller-scale web projects in the past myself, I know that things always go wrong with launches, and technology often necessitates a trial-and-error approach. Shirky comments that the administration was afraid to do a phased roll-out that would fix mistakes as they appeared, for fear that Republicans would make political hay out of any errors. But as Shirky comments: