And millions of people wanted Mitt Romney to be President?
He could have been the most powerful man in the world entrusted with the U.S. Government. Horrors!
What could they have been thinking?
Inside Team Romney's IT meltdown
Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.
It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Day—largely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects.
Called "Orca," an allusion to the Obama campaign's own voter identification program, code-named Narwhal [See? Romney is late, second in line and behind already] , orcas are the top predator of narwhals, Romney campaign staffers explained, the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.
Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.
As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a "huge clusterf*ck."
IT projects are easy scapegoats for organizational failures. There's no way to know if Romney could have made up the margins in Ohio if Orca had worked. But the catastrophic failure of the system, purchased at large expense, squandered the campaign's most valuable resource—people—and was symptomatic of a much bigger leadership problem.
The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place(in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."
Here's how it happened.
After a debacle of enormous proportions such as this, how could anybody think Mitt Romney was qualified to organize even a child’s birthday party? Probably plan on having a pony ride and end up with a trailer full of frogs!
