During the early 1950s I worked for a large manufacturing
company – I believe there were over 4,000 employees.
The company bigwigs prided themselves on being in the
forefront of technology, so the decision was made to upgrade the data
processing system, as it was called in those pre-IT days, to take advantage of
the new equipment and methods which had been developed during wartime.
After many months of planning by highly trained analysts, a
new system for streamlining the order processing, shipping and billing procedures
was ready to go. The changeover was scheduled to take place over a weekend. Haha.
Now I am speaking about a rather large system: this
company was shipping fifty freight-car-loads and over 200 truckloads of product
each day. One can see that any delay
would cost big bucks.
For three
weeks not one item of product left the plant! Those individuals responsible for installing the system were
working over 100 hours per week in order to get it going!
After the system finally was up and running, and it did
work well after the bugs were out, those same individuals were working
somewhere else.
The point is – the system was a massive disaster at first,
but eventually the problems were solved. But it took time.
You can write this as an immutable fact: People who expect
a large, complicated system to work from the get-go are only fooling themselves.
The analyst can only prepare for those events most likely to cause a problem,
but he can never anticipate every
possible thing that could go wrong.
Although the above case was relatively large, it is
dwarfed by the size of the ACA website. And there is one additional
complicating factor: The ACA analysts are working for the government. It is
highly likely that by the time they really got into the project, they were
faced with innumerable suggestions and demands from countless paragons of
self-interest, otherwise known as Congresspersons.
In spite of its huge size, the ACA website does not appear
to contain any problems which have not already been solved years ago by, say,
the IRS, the Pentagon and numerous other entities, both public and private.
But it will take time.
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My books, “There Are Only Seven Jokes” and “The Spirit Runs Through
It” are available in paperback or Kindle at Amazon.
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