It’s been 8 years since Katrina, but a good story about the Federal Government working well can’t be repeated too often and serves as a lesson to CMS and others operating Federal systems. The agency that worked extremely well during and in the immediate aftermath of Katrina was the U.S. Coast Guard. The USGG didn’t need anyone is Washington D.C. to direct them. Their rescue mission is well defined and executed 24/7/356 without hesitation or confusion.
But there is another Federal organization that actually worked extremely well before, during and after Katrina. The National Finance Center (NFC) is a part of the Department of Agriculture and processes the personnel and payroll for many other agencies and organizations. NFC’s massive data center is located in New Orleans on a spit of land between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne. Before Katrina it had over 1,100 employees, processed payroll/personnel for 600,000 federal employees as well as processing health benefits for ~2M participants. Other organizations at the data center had about 350 employees and made over 2.5M payments back then and ran several financial and administrative systems.
Sounds like a disaster in the making huh? Somehow Gil Hawk and his teams managed to keep ALL MAJOR FEDERAL FUNCTIONS running in spite of the affects of the storm on the NFC employees lives, families and homes. How’d they do that? Through contingency planning, practice drills of those plans, continuity of operations (COOP) preparations, establishing alternate operational sites, off-site data storage and backup infrastructure, and a host of other well-known and recognized techniques for ensuring continuity of services under the most adverse conditions.
If the Healthcare.gov team at CMS hasn’t reached out to Gil Hawk yet, they should. After the current “glitches” of the Exchange portal are fixed, and the back-end systems for subsidy calculation and payment to insurance companies are rolled out. They need to quickly focus on Preparedness Planning. The Healthcare.gov data centers aren’t surrounded by lakes…. but they’re probably on the same electrical grid, nor’easter area, communications cable trunk, ‘’snowmageddon’ zone, or eastern-earthquake area. Since planning doesn't seem to be CMS's strong suit, it needs to ensure that they redouble efforts to prepare for these or other conceivable natural or man-caused major disruptions. They couldn't go wrong by seeking advice from Mr. Hawk.
Give kudos to Gil Hawk and the dedicated employees at NFC.
The media ‘talking heads’ who suggest “outsourcing” to contractors as a solution to developing and operating federal systems are wrong.
Follow this blog and read about the Myth of Successful Outsourcing in the next post.
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