Three federal software disasters. One fired CEO with a $250,000 bonus. And 88,000 public servants still waiting to be paid correctly. Canada's government IT crisis just got worse.
Have you ever read (or read about) the book, "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win"
Yes, it predates when the Phoenix payment system started, and there are rumours that the consultants involved used that name deliberately to reference that book.
What the Government has been asking for is wrong, and the technology providers that the politicians demand government agencies outsource to know that if they try to educate the government on the source of the flaws then they won't get hired for any projects.
The problem isn't the bureaucracy, but politicians who are ideologically tied to the idea of outsourcing to the private sector projects that should be handled internally using an entirely different model of IT infrastructure than political elites want to push.
I know the blame is always shifted away from the politicians and their ideological blinders, but that is where we need to be looking.
(I'm writing this as someone who tried to alert politicians on many areas of technology policy, only to constantly be reminded that misinformed politicians can't tell science from science fiction).
The March 2026 Auditor General report on Dayforce locates the same failure Russell is describing, just not where he's pointing. Treasury Board has known since 2016 that pay rules needed to be simplified before deploying any new system. Nine years later, it still hasn't reached consensus with unions. So PSPC is now building custom "cloud extensions" into Dayforce, at $4 million per year, to process rules that were supposed to be simplified first. The mechanism isn't outsourcing ideology. It's the same internal failure to act that produced Phoenix.
Sorry -- I guess I was still feeling the deflection to vendors that was a focus of media attention at the time.
IT projects in government fail for many reasons, and the book I mentioned that was published in 2013 talks about many of the problems that concurrently happened with the building of the Phoenix payment system.
The fact that the department wanted to go ahead with the IT solution BEFORE simplifying the pay rules was a key part of what IBM was concerned with. It was seen as an IT project failure, or a failure of the vendor, when it was a government process failure.
I was told the rushed timeline (IT project before HR/collective agreement project) related to politicians, but I don’t have any specific references to that. Much of what I know about the project relates to having socialized with some people who worked at IBM at the time (nothing "on the record"), and after all the media attention reduced would talk about how people at IBM knew the project would fail when the bid was put out. It was in the context of them expressing frustrating that the only way to win government bids was to ignore the viability of what was being asked and bid anyway.
I did a little more searching (google, LLM), and what is written about suggests that the rumours are actually not cause-and-effect but a naming coincidence.
“The real-world initiative became a textbook example of catastrophic IT failure, plagued by massive underpayments, overpayments, and billions in budget overruns. Because the book The Phoenix Project is a novel about fixing a broken, over-budget IT initiative of the exact same name, people frequently conflate the fictional story with the real-life IBM Canadian payroll debacle.”
This barely scratches the surface. The GoC is an endless graveyard of failed IT projects - those that went way over budget, or failed to deliver the benefits that were promised, or never even made it to production.
If Canadians knew just how abysmal the federal gubbermint's IT infrastructure and software systems are, they would lose confidence in the gubbermint completely. The big IT corps like IBM have the feds over the proverbial barrel.
Bureaucrats depend on consultants (who are usually tied to industry) to create the request for proposals. As a result, the corps end up dictating the terms and conditions so they make sure their deliverables are vague enough to ensure they get paid regardless how badly they perform.
We really need new political leaders who can begin to extract neoliberal concepts, norms and results from government. I don't see any Canadian leaders yet with a political-economic vision which sees beyond the reach of neoliberalism...
My daughter-in-law worked on the Dayforce implementation and seems quite pleased with how it is going. On the other hand, the world is rife with government IT failures. The Register (www.theregister.com), an IT news website, should have a section specifically for these failures.
It’s not just Committees and the AG who are asking. Mine was one of the first Phoenix files transferred at the end of 2015. I spent 10 years in the midst of pay and tax nightmares both pre and post retirement and finally gave up last year and signed off on what may/may not be their final reckoning with me.
Have you ever read (or read about) the book, "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win"
Yes, it predates when the Phoenix payment system started, and there are rumours that the consultants involved used that name deliberately to reference that book.
What the Government has been asking for is wrong, and the technology providers that the politicians demand government agencies outsource to know that if they try to educate the government on the source of the flaws then they won't get hired for any projects.
The problem isn't the bureaucracy, but politicians who are ideologically tied to the idea of outsourcing to the private sector projects that should be handled internally using an entirely different model of IT infrastructure than political elites want to push.
I know the blame is always shifted away from the politicians and their ideological blinders, but that is where we need to be looking.
(I'm writing this as someone who tried to alert politicians on many areas of technology policy, only to constantly be reminded that misinformed politicians can't tell science from science fiction).
The March 2026 Auditor General report on Dayforce locates the same failure Russell is describing, just not where he's pointing. Treasury Board has known since 2016 that pay rules needed to be simplified before deploying any new system. Nine years later, it still hasn't reached consensus with unions. So PSPC is now building custom "cloud extensions" into Dayforce, at $4 million per year, to process rules that were supposed to be simplified first. The mechanism isn't outsourcing ideology. It's the same internal failure to act that produced Phoenix.
Sorry -- I guess I was still feeling the deflection to vendors that was a focus of media attention at the time.
IT projects in government fail for many reasons, and the book I mentioned that was published in 2013 talks about many of the problems that concurrently happened with the building of the Phoenix payment system.
The fact that the department wanted to go ahead with the IT solution BEFORE simplifying the pay rules was a key part of what IBM was concerned with. It was seen as an IT project failure, or a failure of the vendor, when it was a government process failure.
I was told the rushed timeline (IT project before HR/collective agreement project) related to politicians, but I don’t have any specific references to that. Much of what I know about the project relates to having socialized with some people who worked at IBM at the time (nothing "on the record"), and after all the media attention reduced would talk about how people at IBM knew the project would fail when the bid was put out. It was in the context of them expressing frustrating that the only way to win government bids was to ignore the viability of what was being asked and bid anyway.
I did a little more searching (google, LLM), and what is written about suggests that the rumours are actually not cause-and-effect but a naming coincidence.
“The real-world initiative became a textbook example of catastrophic IT failure, plagued by massive underpayments, overpayments, and billions in budget overruns. Because the book The Phoenix Project is a novel about fixing a broken, over-budget IT initiative of the exact same name, people frequently conflate the fictional story with the real-life IBM Canadian payroll debacle.”
Oops
This barely scratches the surface. The GoC is an endless graveyard of failed IT projects - those that went way over budget, or failed to deliver the benefits that were promised, or never even made it to production.
If Canadians knew just how abysmal the federal gubbermint's IT infrastructure and software systems are, they would lose confidence in the gubbermint completely. The big IT corps like IBM have the feds over the proverbial barrel.
Bureaucrats depend on consultants (who are usually tied to industry) to create the request for proposals. As a result, the corps end up dictating the terms and conditions so they make sure their deliverables are vague enough to ensure they get paid regardless how badly they perform.
We really need new political leaders who can begin to extract neoliberal concepts, norms and results from government. I don't see any Canadian leaders yet with a political-economic vision which sees beyond the reach of neoliberalism...
My daughter-in-law worked on the Dayforce implementation and seems quite pleased with how it is going. On the other hand, the world is rife with government IT failures. The Register (www.theregister.com), an IT news website, should have a section specifically for these failures.
It’s not just Committees and the AG who are asking. Mine was one of the first Phoenix files transferred at the end of 2015. I spent 10 years in the midst of pay and tax nightmares both pre and post retirement and finally gave up last year and signed off on what may/may not be their final reckoning with me.