Clay Johnson is founder and CEO of the Department of Better Technology and the author of an e-book on modernizing the federal government’s procurement process. He was also a founder of Blue State Digital, which powered much of the technology behind Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. And he’s had some strong words for HealthCare.Gov. We spoke this morning, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Ezra Klein: Your view is that HealthCare.Gov is symptomatic of larger problems in the way government manages IT and procurement. What do you mean by that?
Clay Johnson: Computer World yesterday came out with a report that took the last 10 years worth of IT procurements that are greater than $10 million and showed that 96 percent of them fail. They come in over budget, or vastly too late, or they don’t work at all. To me, if you’re going to spend a whole bunch of money on a process with a 96 percent failure rate, it pretty much guarantees it won’t work out that well. This just isn’t something we’re very good at. And HealthCare.gov is a symptom of that overall problem.
EK: So why do you think the failure rate for these major IT projects in government is so high?
CJ: Generally in technology, smaller products that iterate into becoming larger after they get in front of customers and get used tend to work better than trying to build something with upfront requirements that may or may not work out.
The second reason is that because of the amount of money involved, government becomes really afraid of failure, which is a bit ironic, as this ends up leading to failure. But that fear of failure leads them to only want to work with known quantities, and known quantities mean contractors who’ve done this work in the past. That puts them with a group of entrenched vendors who haven’t really had to compete in the world of technology.
The other part is that there aren’t enough people inside government with the technical knowledge to oversee this stuff. In 1996, Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution took out this Office of Technology Assessment that was kind of the digital brains of Congress. It was like an internal think tank on technology issues that advised Congress. That got axed. So there isn’t a real technical brain inside of Congress because there’s no one really advising them, the way lawyers advise them on the law, on technology. And you have some of the same problem in the executive branch. You have people like [CTO] Todd Park but it’s not in every agency.
EK: Let’s go back to your point about entrenched vendors. I think the image people have of these bidding processes is the government says they’ll pay X amount for a service and then every company that thinks it can do the job and wants the money makes a bid. But your view is that the way the process is structured effectively excludes a lot of companies that aren’t specialists in making those kinds of bids already. Why is that?
Date: October 22, 2013