Oregon vs. Oracle: the Battle of Blame Heats Up 83
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "The ongoing efforts to assign responsibility for the disastrous attempts to create the Cover Oregon health exchange, the primary contractor for which was Oracle Corporation, have entered a new round, with Governor John Kitzhaber calling on State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to initiate legal action against the firm. Kitzhaber has also sought the help of Washington D.C. in sanctioning Oracle, though Oregon's own management of the project and the terms of their contract with Oracle muddy the waters, considerably. Although the AG's office hasn't committed to filing suit, yet, AG Rosenblum has said, 'I share your determination to recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled.' Although the outcome of this is uncertain, it is likely heads, both corporate and political, will roll."
Re:Who is to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
The majority of Republican-run states refused to set up their own marketplace, they refused to expand Medicaid, and so your statement could be literally true, but also fallacious.
Perhaps you could list those states which had competently run exchanges and effective expansions of Medicaid?
orly? Portland ahead of curve, big open source hub (Score:4, Interesting)
When Oregon’s new Chief Information Officer, Alex Pettit,was on our show recently, we asked him what stood out from his move from Oklahoma to the northwest. He said there were some expected cultural differences, but that in terms of IT he was caught by surprise:
I was surprised that things like open source wasn’t as bigin government as it is in the East Coast, or in Oklahoma, where I was. I was surprised that transparency wasn’t a bigger issue. It’s certainly a big issue in Oklahoma, and it’s less so here.
This was striking because Oregon is known for its open source community — at Oregon State’s Open Source Lab, at the annual OSCON Conference, and among many programmers. And his comments came right before an Oregonian op-ed argued that open source software could have prevented the Cover Oregon fiasco.
http://www.opb.org/radio/progr... [opb.org]
The only mistake that may have been made by Oregon State gov. tech people was letting Federal officials talk into going outside Oregon for the website project.
Re:Why does Oracle want to dirty its reputation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle is less likely to get future government contracts in other states or levels if they have the reputation for being a drama queen and "difficult", regardless of fault. They may be better off quietly negotiating a compromise and eating some of the costs in the short term. Is the loud approach part of their Ellison bravado culture?
You've obviously never done business with Oracle. Oracle has the same attitude about their customers as Microsoft did in the 90s. The just don't fucking care. You HAVE to have them. Everything corporate IT is in some way related to Oracle and Cisco. If you want to use anything else, you need smarter (higher paid) people, software that's not as common, and it's harder to find people that know juniper for example. Oracle knows this, but they overplay their hand. I don't know many people that like Oracle anymore. I know at least 3 companies I've worked with that have sued, and won cases against them. Nearly every contract I've been involved with them in has ended in legal negotiations of some sort. We avoid them like the plague now, but for some things we have no other choice.