Arnold Kling on the problems with the health insurance exchanges
Somebody who had experience with creating a health insurance brokerage business would know that the systems problems are more complicated than just putting up a web site. In the background, the system needs to communicate with the systems at several government agencies and at the insurance companies. That changes it from a simple technical project to a complex, time-consuming, project involving business and technical staff.
You build a complex, mission-critical system through a process of continual negotiations among business units and technical people. You do not treat it as a procurement process. You cannot just write up a spec, put it up for bid, and parcel it out to dozens of contractors.
The development of the computer system probably would fall under operations, but you would want a project executive with a lot of authority to negotiate with all of the business units and to make project decisions. When conflicts arise, the project executive should be able to go straight to the CEO and get them resolved.
The project executive’s main focus is keeping the project’s complexity from getting out of control. The project executive must have the authority to trim features in order to meet deadlines.
You go through a lot of analysis and many painful meetings before anyone writes a line of code. The technical staff have to be able to challenge the business units, because sometimes the business unit asks for something to be done in a really complicated way, when a much simpler solution is available to solve the business problem.
One of the worst things that can happen on a systems project is to find yourself revisiting the business-technical negotiations process after writing a lot of code. If that is what is happening now, this project is in an unbelievable amount of trouble.
5. I suspect that the technical problems are mere symptoms. Probably what is fundamentally messed up in this health insurance brokerage business is the org chart.
There is more here.