HealthCare.gov could've used a heavy dose of project governance

If you’re one of the thousands (millions?) of Americans who’ve run up against the mess that is federal health insurance exchange website you may be wondering — in colorful language — how such an important project could be such a disaster. But before you start cursing the coders and damning the developers, consider this: by all accounts there was very little accounting for what was going on during the site-building process. In this week’s lead Searchlight item, MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business research fellow Michael Schrage explains that blame lies not with those who worked on the site but with the fact that there was no project governance to guide them. But not all the news out of Washington this week is so glum: This week’s searchlight also highlights Congressional efforts to thwart devious data brokers and patent trolls. Keep reading to learn about Facebook’s dabblings in deep learning and Wikipedia’s hard lesson on the limits of collaboration.