Monday, October 21, 2013

This smacks of desperation...

This smacks of desperation...  Obama announces a “tech surge” to fix the broken ObamaCare web sites.  That's not what you do to fix a few little “glitches”.  That might be what you do if your technical team is telling you that the web site is badly broken and it's going to take months and months to fix it.  An ignorant and desperate manager, in that situation, might convince himself that the answer is to throw as many smart people as he can.

Large systems that were poorly designed generally cannot be fixed in a big hurry.  Patching symptoms, while a common response, isn't likely to actually fix the problems.  Careful study by experts who are thoroughly immersed in the details of the technology are what it's going to take – and that's not what a new team of “experts” will bring to the party.  At least not quickly, which is the stated goal...

I suspect it will be many months before those web sites are functioning well.  Maybe more – if they're as poorly designed as some suspect, the shortest path to a functioning system may well be to start over...

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