Item — HN Reader

I understand your cynicism, and it's not entirely misplaced, but this team is both formidable and comes with strong support from the administration—in particular, from US CTO Todd Park.

For whatever reason, the tech press hasn't picked up on Todd yet, but he's as good as it gets. Prior to working for the government, he was a two-time founder: he started both Athena Health (now a public company) and Castlight (recent IPO). When healthcare.gov went down, Todd was the one Obama asked to assemble the "tech surge," including Mikey, and he pitched in around the clock to get things working--literally, at multiple points, sleeping in the office overnight when things went awry. I promise you that the people in charge don't consider this a typical, 9-to-5 job and don't leave teams to fend for themselves. They are there in the trenches.

You can get a sense of who we're working with in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E

1 comments

I don't see it as a technical problem so I don't see technical chops, as impressive as they are, as a solution.

The problem is one of governance. Unless this new group can cancel contracts and ban organizations from participating in future projects I see very little reason to think they will succeed.

They can suggest all they want but if they can't cold stone stop an agency from entering an agreement then they can't change existing behaviors.

You might like to read about the powers of OMB (Office of Management and Budget):

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/organization_mission/

It is not obvious unless you spend your time memorizing government org charts, but US Digital Service is part of OMB.

I can't think of somebody I would rather ban than Oracle. Every time I use a web app with the Oracle logo at the top I have to cringe at what a clusterbomb the user experience is going to be.

They seem to go out of their way to make UI nightmares. That, and I'm thinking of how they had one or two recent high profile failures in California.

Next up: I'll probably hear from their lawyer :-)