Canada's Headed For A HealthCare.gov Disaster Of Its Own

I am deeply disappointed at yet another massive government IT failure, and sadly, not surprised in the slightest. The Canadian government's initiative to consolidate more than 1,500 government websites into a single super site, Canada.ca, is failing and starting to look like Canada's version of the disastrous Healthcare.gov.

Tom CochranThe original deadline for completing the project passes this month, with costs ballooning from $1.54 million to a reported $9.4 million, and growing. A consolidation at this scale is the equivalent of a digital moon-landing, and the first problem was massively underestimating the initial cost and level of effort. It was wrong to choose a closed-source, proprietary solution, and it was wrong to pursue the unnecessarily ambitious consolidation of the entire government's digital presence into a single website.

The financial burden of moving to Canada.ca is being handled by the departments and agencies separately, and since 2015, according to a recent report at CBC, eight of the largest departments have spent more than $28 million on a project now pushed out to December 2017. Progress is glacial. Of the 17 million pages now managed by the Canadian government, only 10,000 have been moved to the new mega-site...