“It’s just a website. We’re not going to the moon”

Time (sub required) has a detailed story on the elite team that rescued the HealthCare.gov site. You can feel the intensity of the salvage project, the apolitical results-oriented approach while the mood all around the project was hostile, the relentless use of “stand up” meetings, the brainpower of A+ technicians many of who have helped many Silicon Valley companies scale and scale big. In a few weeks they offset the disaster that teams many times larger and at the job much longer had brewed.

You wonder what if the team had been there a few weeks earlier, how we would not have even heard about the complexity of the project. On the flip side you wonder what if the President had decided to scrap the project and start over – a very real scenario described in the article.

But the critical point the article makes is

“But one lesson of the fall and rise of HealthCare.gov has to be that the practice of awarding high-tech, high-stakes contracts to companies whose primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them has to change”

The problem is its not just an issue in Washington. Most IT projects have mostly B and C players, many from outsourcers, when they promise the A+ players. And it is not just during implementation projects – it actually gets worse post-live. You have to look at costs of hosting and on-going support of most enterprise apps to see how bad the problem is. Bring an elite team in, and within days they could easily identify ways to cut costs by 50-90%. Trust me that is even less like going to the moon.

But we don’t and in fact encourage such behavior to continue. An example comes from Business Solutions Magazine about the massive Target data breach

“If you haven’t spoken to your retail customers about the Target breach, I recommend you do so immediately. You can bet that they’re reading up on the breach, have all sorts of questions and concerns, and are probably getting solicitations from other solutions providers promising to make them safe and feel secure. Next, offer to improve their data security by using antivirus tools, firewalls, and smart network design.”

Seriously, how many VARs know about the specific variant of the POS virus that is speculated to have been involved, especially since Target has been tightlipped and how many can deliver the A+ quality that could have prevented or quickly limited damage to the tens of millions of cards compromised?

We have to quit encouraging firms whose “primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them”. As buyers, as industry observers, as vendors.

HealthCare.gov is a wake up call for all of us.