Ottawa’s Tech Strategy Is So Broken, Even Consultants Are Begging Us to Fix It | The Walrus

How the country became a cautionary tale in building government software

iStock / Wikimedia Commons / Kevin Ilango I n 2011 , the Government of Canada contracted American tech giant IBM to build a new system to manage its payments to civil servants. Beset by bugs, delays, and cost overruns, the new Phoenix pay system was finally unveiled in 2016. And it was a disaster. Civil servants were overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. The boondoggle racked up $3.5 billion in additional costs and forced the government to draw up plans to purchase an entirely new pay system. That, too, has been delayed. In 2020, Ottawa launched ArriveCAN: a nimble, Swiss Army knife of an a

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