A report by a private foundation on how the Obamacare website was designed reveals that cronyism and sheer incompetence is at fault for the spectacular failures of the rollout. InfoWorld summed it up: "It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT." "All but one of of the 47 contractors who won contracts to carry out work on the Affordable Care Act worked for the government prior to its passage," the report reads. Some of the names ought to be familiar: Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Deloitte, and Booz Allen Hamilton, all of whom assumed different roles and worked on different aspects of the project. As familiar as those names might be, especially to those who follow Beltway lobbying practices, few of them would be as commonly associated with large-scale IT projects as, say, Google, Amazon.com, or Dell would be -- especially when it came to building the public-facing components of the system. (Techdirt...(Read Full Post)