原因？失敗的計劃和改造政府
Above all, there is the inertia of the past. One of the first lessons Dickerson learned about D.C. when he arrived was that the city traditionally conflates the importance of a task with its cost. Healthcare.gov ultimately became an $800 million project, with 55 contracting companies involved. "And of course it didn’t work," he says. "They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as -Healthcare.gov—8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million." Dickerson believes that the Healthcare.gov project could have been done with a similar size budget. But there wasn’t anyone to insist that the now-well-established Silicon Valley practice of building "agile" -software—rolling out a digital product in stages; testing it; improving it; and repeating the process for continuous -improvement—would be vastly superior to (and much, much cheaper than) a patchwork of contractors building out a complete and monolithic website. In his Fast Company interview, President Obama remarks that he made a significant mistake in thinking that government could use traditional methods to build something—Healthcare.gov—that had never been built before. "When you’re dealing with IT and software and program design," the president explains, "it’s a creative process that can’t be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils."...
It helps that the two men have substantial "air cover," as President Obama describes it in an exclusive, in-person interview with Fast Company. For the past year, the president explains, he has personally helped Park and his team hire talent and implement their ideas across a host of government agencies. While the reasons behind this initiative and its scope have not been made clear before, in the president’s view, the idea of building a "pipeline" of tech talent in Washington starts with practical appeal: Better digital tools could upgrade the websites of, say, the Veterans Administration, so users get crucial services that save time, money, and (for veterans in need of medical help) lives. "But what we realized was, this could be a recipe for something larger," the president explains. "You will have a more user-friendly government, a more responsive government. A government that can work with individuals on individual problems in a more tailored way, because the technology facilitates that the same way it increasingly does for private-sector companies." In other words, if Obama’s tech team can successfully rebuild the digital infrastructure of Washington—an outcome that is by no means certain yet—you might not only change its functionality. You might transform Americans’ attitudes about government too. And you might even boost their waning feelings of empowerment in an ideologically riven country of 320 million people.之前的經驗
To a certain extent, the Obama administration has always been a comfortable place for techies like Maurer; the president—whose 2008 campaign was arguably the most convincing demonstration at the time of social media -potential—was the first chief executive to appoint a chief technology officer and, more recently, a chief data officer. "Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector," Obama says. "And when I came into government, what surprised me most was that gap." But creating high-level positions like the CTO was a route to better government technology policy, not necessarily better operations. Besides, the immediate priority was addressing the economic crisis and resolving military entanglements.如何遊說頂尖的資訊工程師參與政府的工作
Then President Obama opens the door and surprises everyone, and over the course of 45 minutes gives the sales pitch to beat all sales pitches. They need to come work for him. They will need to take a pay cut, the president announces. But he doesn’t care what it takes—he will personally call their bosses, their spouses, their kids to convince them. The crowd laughs. But he gravely responds: I am completely serious. He needs them to overhaul the government’s digital infrastructure now. "What are you going to say to that?" asks Lisa. ...
This idea appeals greatly to the president—in fact, it was built into the USDS design from the start. "I’m having personal conversations with folks, meeting with them, or groups of them, and pitching them," Obama says. "And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth. But sometimes what’s missing is purpose. To what end are we doing this?" As the president explains, he asks potential recruits, "Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools you’re developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?" For the time being, at least, there seems to be. HBO might want to consider an on-location shoot.
第一個計畫
Tech moved up on the punch list in 2013 due to a new crisis: the Healthcare.gov fiasco. When the president’s key legislative achievement was mortally threatened by a nonfunctioning website, Todd Park, as CTO, was among those asked to help rescue the endeavor. Before his stint in government, Park had started two medical IT companies now valued at over a billion dollars each, and it was that experience, not policy or politics, that he called upon. Park recruited Dickerson from Google, as well as a half-dozen other engineers. This small team, working around the clock in Maryland, fixed the site in seven hectic weeks. Not only did the effort "save the president’s baby," as one former White House staffer puts it, it crystallized within the administration the impact that just a handful of deeply talented techies could have on our government’s functionality. And it prompted Obama, Park, and their colleagues to wonder: Could an infusion of West Coast tech talent become permanent? What might that achieve?如何要求政府機關配合
What’s more, with the solid backing of the president and his chief of staff, the USDS has enough of what Dickerson calls "hard power" to fix important problems around town. Quite simply, the president can (and does) ask his cabinet secretaries to take seriously any USDS overtures to work on projects within their agencies.Dr. D.J. Patil, Data Science: Where are We Going?, Strata + Hadoop 2015 (說明歐巴馬的角色)
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