Grabner identifies design and scalability as the greatest challenges for Healthcare.gov.

"The goal is to enable users to do what they want with the application as fast as possible, minimizing the steps required to get from logging onto the page to finding their life insurance," he says. "It seems they basically made it harder than necessary by adding more steps and features to the site in order to offer users more flexibility. But in the end, most users just want to go through the process as fast as possible and get results. They want to open their browsers, go to the website and get their insurance."

The problem, Grabner says, is that system "architects made decisions under time constraints and selected frameworks they thought would help them, but while they helped push this out as fast as possible, they didn't help their scalability goals."

For his part, Grabner says the White House's "all hands on deck" reaction to Healthcare.gov's woes may be counterproductive.

"Typically war rooms are not the most efficient way to solve a crisis like this," he says. "It makes more sense to have a smaller group of people look at the big picture and say, 'Where are our bottlenecks, where are our major problems?' I don't think it makes sense to put 100 people in a room and fire them up by telling them this problem needs to be solved as soon as possible and putting a lot of pressure on them."

Meanwhile, a high-ranking executive for a healthcare software company that serves as a subcontractor to some state health insurance exchanges tells Healthcare IT News that the federal site appears to be a victim of politics and bureaucracy.

"Big IT projects are difficult to do, but if you look at how people get big IT projects done, they use agile, iterative approaches to build a little bit of software, get it to work, then scale it," he says. "That's how Apple or Google brings a product to market. They get something out quickly, then they iterate from there, and they make sure it performs operationally. And you could argue that the federal government took exactly the opposite approach."

That approach was being driven by politics, he argues.

"I think they caved into the political pressures and tried to do too much overall in too short a time frame," he says. "They've got all these health plans, they got all these different constituents, and in the process of trying to listen to these constituents they ended up with an unwieldy set of overall system requirements. Then they tried to bring that to the market in sort of a big bang."

Beyond that, the executive says, Healthcare.gov appears to have fallen victim to classic government mismanagement.

"The second issue, as far as I can tell, is that HHS tried to be its own systems integrator," he says. "Everyone keeps talking about CGI, but the actual prime contractor was the federal government. And I think there are a lot of signification questions about whether the federal government, in the form of HHS, has the skills to manage a project of that complexity."

The executive says the administration's initial response to the problems plaguing Healthcare.gov may be counterproductive.

"You've got (HHS Secretary Kathleen) Sebelius and Obama basically saying, 'We're beating up our contractors and getting them to work 24/7,'" he says. "When what you really want to be doing is having honest, candid conversations with your contractors."

[See also: What happened to Healthcare.gov?]