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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

So in the 1990s Canada failed to do a payroll system where they paid Accenture Canada $70M

Then in 2010s they spent $185M on a customized version of IBM's PeopleSoft that was managed directly by a government agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

And now in 2020s they are going to spend $385M integrating an existing SaaS made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayforce

That's probably one of the worst and longest software failures in history.

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Oh, it's much more interesting than that. Phoenix started as an attempt to create a gun registry. Ottawa had a bunch of civil servants that'd be reasonably compotent at overseeing such a thing, but the government decided that it wanted to build it in Miramichi, New Brunswick. The relevant people refused to move to Miramichi, so the project was built using IBM contractors and newbies. The resulting fiasco was highly predictable.

Then when Harper came in he killed the registry mostly for ideological reasons.

But then he didn't want to destroy a bunch of jobs in Miramichi, so he gave them another project to turn into a fiasco.

> Then when Harper came in he killed the registry mostly for ideological reasons.

The registry was started mostly for ideological reasons.

Sure, that's obvious. What isn't obvious is why it was killed. It could have been killed because it was a giant cluster@#$%, that would have been reason enough. But if it would have been killed for that reason, they wouldn't have let the cluster%$## spread.

> Canada failed to do a payroll system

New Zealand tried to do a new payroll system for teachers called Novopay which imploded spectacularly and is still creating grief. The system is now called EdPay (the government decided to take over the privately created system). The total cost of the debacle was north of $200M NZD. Somehow they managed to fail to replace a working system!

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