E-Government as an Innovative Product: Theories and Case Study - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 130

6.3 Research Methodology
This section uses alternative methods to answer this paper's initially grounded
research questions.
6.3.1 Case of the Obamacare Website
The first research method is a case study of the Healthcare.gov website, which is more
commonly referred to as the Obamacare website and was rolled out on October 1,
2013. This website allows uninsured Americans to enroll in healthcare insurance in
a private exchange marketplace run through the Healthcare.gov website. After the
website went live on October 1, there were numerous reports of glitches, error mes-
sages, and crashes on the website. It took almost a month for the website to get fixed
and fully functional, with problems still being reported after the deadline.
This case study provides a good example of a very public e-government project
failure. Moreover, it can be considered an innovative product for the U.S. govern-
ment because it uses novel methods as a means of dealing with the real social problem
concerning uninsured Americans. It is also a recent and representative e-government
case and demonstrates what can go wrong when innovation is not put front and cen-
ter with e-government development. To this end, the results from this case study's
analysis can illustrate whether the government recognized the e-government project
as an innovation and performed respective management practices.
The analysis that follows is from a mixed-methods approach, using NVivo 10
software, analyzing Twitter feeds with the search term Obamacare website from
October 1, 2013, to January 20, 2014. Authors collected the top 320 tweets from
this period and did a word search for their most common occurrences using NVivo.
These top tweets included those on Twitter's top tweets feed and those that were
retweeted more than 10 times.
Examining the word frequency summary, some of the most common words
found in top tweets were predominantly negative referring to the Obamacare web-
site, with issues of security (2.68%), crashes (0.91%), and problems (0.71%).
These findings depict that this project was launched before its completion and
proper testing. Although this conclusion sounds obvious, findings from the tweet
analysis reflect significant technical issues, which could have been prevented with
simple project management processes. The government's delayed reactions to the
technical problems indicate a lack in precrisis risk analysis and preparation for post-
crisis management. Moreover, in this website rollout, there was much less attention
devoted toward the website acting as an important vehicle to implement the new
healthcare law. The overall dissatisfaction of the website rollout as seen through the
tweets illustrates that the government did not pay close attention to their customers
and, to this end, to product success, which is a prerequisite for innovation product
success (Fagerberg, 2004). All these outcomes validate that this extremely innova-
tive project was not managed with respective best practices.