Post-Obamacare, more fed tech hurdles ahead

A defective website is the least of the government’s tech problems. The HealthCare.gov mishap illuminated a cracked federal procurement system that lacks adequate management and routinely misuses millions of taxpayer dollars. And it might stay that way, despite a mounting list of tech projects much larger and more nuanced than a broken insurance portal.

The government already faces a stalled attempt to further digitize veterans’ medical records. It must prove the Federal Aviation Administration can overhaul the country’s air traffic control system without planes falling from the sky and that a critical nationwide safety network will actually work. The Federal Communications Commission needs to create the infrastructure to auction off precious airwaves, and the Department of Homeland Security has to figure out how it will process millions of workers should an immigration bill pass. President Barack Obama blasts systemic failures but gives little indication how he‘ll fix them. Federal IT bills languish in Congress. And industry pleas meet silence. “You should be concerned; you should have been concerned for years,” said Jim Johnson, founder of the Standish Group, which studies IT failures. “This is something that has been broken for a long, long time. … It’s probably just getting worse.” The research firm calculates 94 percent of large federal IT projects in the past decade ranked as unsuccessful. More than half got delayed, went over budget or didn’t live up to expectations.

[Dec 23]