Who Has the Responsibility for the Failure of Phoenix?

IBM is the company that was commissioned to create a new People Soft-based payroll system known as for more than a hundred governmental departments and agencies. Until now, over 80,000 government employees are receiving either underpay or overpay and even no payment at all. As thousands of these government workers are still waiting to get the proper payment, IBM has already earned over $140 million and counting on the Phoenix payroll system for designing and implementing it.

According to high positioned government managers, lack of training is the cause of the irregularities and malfunction of the system.

IBM: issues are with implementation

Meanwhile, IBM Canada insisted that the greater part of the problem in the implementation is brought by data and process issues and not the problem in the technical system. Moreover, Alex Beraskow, an IT management consultant who’ve worked for the federal government for three decades opine that the software was strong and have been used well by the Canadian government for more than 20 years. He pointed out that even it is either programmed properly or users were trained, there would be always several points of failure in working with huge project.

Ontario social assistance program also had issues

On the other hand, another big government IT failure has been worked by IBM. The company also created a computer system to manage Ontario’s social assistance program but unfortunately, it was delivered late, puzzled with mistakes and labeled over budget. A technology management professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) in Gatineau, named Tamas Koplyay believes that IBM is responsible for the complete failure and it’s just too easy to put the blame on the insufficient training. Furthermore, Koplyay said that since the company has given the job to implement the new program, it should have ensured that all the proper systems were use throughout the process.