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0 pointsmseebach12y ago0 comments

Generally: get government out of the business of procuring custom software and shift to procuring outcomes.

Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing by revenue pr. successful transaction + an SLA that deducts an appropriate penalty if it isn't met.

Ideally, you don't even need to pick a winner, you can just say that any provider that successfully operates such a marketplace will get the revenue per transaction and let the market sort it out. End users will gravitate towards the sites that are fast and easy to use, "Consumer Reports" will test them etc. Lean, agile shops will win. Clunky, well-connected, but technically unsophisticated government contractors will fail.

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d2312y ago

Yeah, because you're going to get the highest quality from firms that want to do completely speculative work. That's why 99 designs has the best designs, right? If you know you're the best, you'll compete for free!

mseebachOP12y ago

It's not speculative? If the work achieves the stated end-goal-metric ("A citizen of the state of South Tennechigan can purchase a health insurance plan subject to the given constraints.") the operator is awarded the revenue offered ("$150 per successfully sold health insurance plan").

Think of it as a feed-in tariff. If you successfully purchase, install and connect a solar panel, and the panel feeds power into the grid, you're paid. If not, because you screw up any of these steps, you don't get paid. If you make a substandard installation (say, in the shadow or on a north-facing roof), you get paid less. The only thing that matters is the desired end goal: solar power is fed into the grid. You carry the risk, you get paid for the result.

The idea is that (at least in these cases) it's much, much easier to describe and document a desired outcome than to accurately describe and anticipate all the variables that potentially affects the outcome.

rtkwe12y ago

The problem comes in when you factor in the danger of ever changing political and project climates. In this case if the Republican party had been successful in revoking the ACA whatever work the contractors were doing was now completely wasted through no cause or fault of their own.

In your analogy it would be like you're successfully installing the panel and suddenly there's a massive tree completely shading the solar panels or the power company suddenly refusing to accept feed-in power from residential structures.

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