Many years before the creation of Healthcare.gov, President Obama embraced data analytics during his early years in the Senate.
In 2006, he and senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) successfully sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which resulted in creation of usaspending .gov, “a significant tool that makes it much easier to hold elected officials accountable for the way taxpayer money is spent“.
A History of Failed Federal IT Projects
A considerable amount of taxpayer money is spent on federal IT projects, but in contrast to the aspirations of Obama in his early years in the Senate, it is not spent responsibly.
According to the Standish Group report, from 2003 to 2012 only 6% of the federal IT projects with over 10 million dollars of labor cost were successful.
52% of them were either delayed, went over budget or did not meet user expectations. The remaining 41% of the IT projects were abandoned or started from scratch. Perhaps most troubling is that healthcare.gov is just a one example among many.
