This is not how to build a website
From
Computerworld:
'War Room' notes describe IT chaos at Healthcare.gov
On the morning of Oct. 1 in Washington, temperatures in the low 80s were expected, the Republican-engineered federal shutdown was in its first day, and a Healthcare.gov "War Room" team gathered for a meeting. They kept notes.
Many federal offices were empty that day due to the shutdown-caused furloughs of federal employees. But Oct. 1 was also the day of the launch of the Affordable Care Act's Healthcare.gov Website, the main portal to sign up for insurance under the new law. Trouble tickets quickly piled up, and wait times for help desk responses grew to as much as five hours.
At some points in the days immediately following the launch, there were 40,000 people in virtual "waiting rooms" because capacity had been reached. Some were waiting 15 to 20 minutes in these rooms.
The War Room notes, 175 pages in all, were released Monday by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. (PDF War Room notes) Issa, a critic of the health care law, is using the notes to draw attention to the limited number of insurance sign-ups so far. Just six people signed up on the first day.
The War Room notes also catalog IT problems -- dashboards weren't showing data, servers didn't have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn't enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown.
First of all, this would never have happened in the private sector. Team management tools and design standards are too firmly entrenched for a fustercluck of this proportion to ever happen. Building an enterprise-level website is not an impossible task.
People shop at Amazon and use Google all the time. Only a centralized government can create something this bad.
This should be taken down and a professional company be brought in to rewrite it from scratch. There is no saving this pig.
Posted by DaveH at November 8, 2013 11:49 AM