> the people running HealthCare.gov had no "dashboard," no quick way for engineers to measure what was going on at the website
Someone needs to disrupt the government contracts business pronto.
Someone needs to disrupt the government contracts business pronto.
I know people who are involved in this. Just being able to bid takes decades and a network you either can't buy or need to be very rich to buy into. It takes either already being there or finding excellent bonuses (e.g. the kind of benefits that come with setting up your business in Detroit). And then you have to compete with the entrenched interests.
This is, or at least can be, far down the ladder from Lockheed-Martin. But it's the same kind of environment: If you're already there, it's easy money. If you're not, it almost certainly out of your league. If you know how to play the game, you still need to know the right people. If you do know the right people, you need to grease their palms. And once you've done that, you're part of the problem.
"Someone needs to disrupt x" is a magically simplistic and meaningless point of view.
It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, though. Procurement practices that are enshrined in law are much harder to disrupt than those that are just bad habits that ossified over time.
Awarding work in this way isn't necessarily a mistake. But when the selection process itself is broken, you end up giving a lot of work over time to a contractor that can't do the work.
Even then, a lot of the problems with Healthcare.gov were caused by incompetence on the government side of things.