Every IT procurement by Canada is a failure, this is not a surprise. The cost is a rounding error though compared to all the other harm this did. We shouldn't get distracted by the easy target of government waste on IT projects, and should focus on the real problems with this app (that it was mandatory, probably illegal, used to police health info, plus caused massive economic damage). These are all bigger problems than the well known cost overruns that happen in this sort of project.
Also, I saw a social media post from a "founder" yesterday about how his company could have built a CRUD app with the same functionality for much more cheaply. Obviously a lot of people with no government contracting experience armchair quarterbacking the cost angle
We need our own version of 18F to build technology patterns and in house expertise so that government is less reliant on outsourcing. With more in house work when government does outsource there would be a much better yardstick to determine requirements and measure success.
This is the most obvious reason for why government procurement and contracting costs are so high.
US/Canada governments have simply dissolved all in house experience. Which means they have no competent and experienced people who can actually evaluate contract bids. But further, they don't have people in-house with either the experience, competence, or power to make agreed upon changes to contracts on the fly.
And because the contracts are so set in stone, that means even if all the bidders are operating completely ethically, they need to pad their margins significantly to account for anything unexpected. But in reality many bidders are not operating ethically and are able to use a lot of the necessary features of a government bidding process (clearly outlined and transparent contracts with very little subjective input) to maximize their revenue and minimize their output.
It is always odd to read comments like this. Can we assume you will you be challenging this at the supreme court? The government passes laws and so it is odd to state something is "illegal" when it may not be the case. It is also odd because every country has special rules/laws around entry that are NOT the same as the laws inside the country. One of the best examples is our neighbour to the south where the border is considered a "constitutional free zone" - allowing search/seizures which are not permitted elsewhere in the country. Far more likely you disagree with it, but that isn't a legal question.
Many "covid" related actions were challenged, and the supreme court of canada ruled in the governments favour, does that mean the supreme court is also wrong? If so, who do you take your complaint to above this court?
Every country on earth has a legal right to control entry at its borders and while Canada was odd to use ArriveCan, pretty much every country demanded vaccine proof when they reopened their borders. Does this mean they all acted illegally?
The government's job is to protect its citizens, again this is why almost every country enacted some form of border control to try to stop covid, but they are all wrong?
I remember when someone like that made a Covid app to show your vaccination status faster and cheaper than Alberta could and the media made him out to be such a hero. One of the hockey teams even required fans to install it to be admitted to the arena.
Well the app consisted of users uploading ID and record of vaccination, then without any check, putting a check mark or something on the screen. All of the uploads were stored in a US server and publicly accessible.
But nothing beats the hero in Ontario that made according to local news stations made fool out of the local government by building stairs in a park for $550 when it was going to cost an outrageous $65k (in the end $10k I think). I think about these stairs[1] whenever someone without experience claims they can make things cheaper.
Good on the person for trying, but ya those stairs are a death trap. What’s worse is the replies that have no idea how bad those stairs are. One injury and you have a $100k lawsuit to settle on top of $65k for the new stairs.
> Canadian tech leaders who have built apps for large corporate clients have described Ottawa’s $54-million price tag for ArriveCan as outrageous, explaining that in their experience, most apps are built for less than $1-million.
Why did you pay $2 billion for this airport? Most buildings cost less than $1 million!
I'd be easy to pile-on with more criticism so I'll do the opposite.
> Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Rangle, said his firm could likely have built the app in less than a month for about $250,000.
> “This is a very simple app,” he said.
Having used ArriveCan I would agree with his quote. It is a very simple app, but what is not simple is writing the specification for it. The contractors weren't given the app and told "how long would it take you to make this?". They were approached to develop "an app to monitor COVID risk at the border", then they had to work with probably several committees, all with different visions and expectations, all trying to get their idea executed.
That's often the part that people forget in favour of easy criticism. ArriveCan is simple, but the process that built it is not, there was no equivalent in the wild that could be used for inspiration, it had a bunch of translation requirements, and needed to interface with existing airport arrival systems.
I'm not saying we should be proud of our government for making a 54M$ CRUD app that, as far as we can tell, did not have much of an impact on COVID being spread, but interviewing a bunch of "IT leaders" and acting as if they would actually sign a contract to build ArriveCan for 250k$ is disingenuous and the Globe and Mail should be ashamed of framing it this way.
so you're saying $250k to build the app once you get specs from the $53,750,000 worth of meetings and planning committees? That sounds much more reasonable and not like $50million worth of tax payer money was stolen /s
Wouldn't it be fair to say that once an organization reaches a certain scale it is expected that communications constitute most of its overhead?
Something like ArriveCan requires the collaboration of several branches of government and ties in with a system that monitors over 2M arrivals in our country every month. Even all the doers attitude in the world won't change the fact that they won't just give you access to those databases without some pretty extensive review.
Just think of the QA needed on the arrival machines at the airport, you can't afford to have them all be out of order because they handle much of the incoming traffic, so the "ArriveCan update" has to be thoroughly tested so that it does not cause any significant downtime. This is the exact opposite of the "move fast and break things" environment.
To summarize, I do think that ArriveCan (the program) was a waste of money, but I think the program itself did not waste money. It's the price that comes with building multi-systems applications.
First, I fully agree with everything you said. It wasnt the best use of money, but these people fail to grasp what it takes to build a system integrated with the government. Dealing with any large org requires a lot of back and forth with contracts, legal, etc and the government is worse as they have entire organizations which seem to be created specifically to slow things down.
Second, your points are most likely falling on deaf ears. All they see is "simple CRUD app costs $54M" and can never see past this, have next to zero experience dealign with large orgs or their complexity, requirements, etc.
Your first point was excellent, but now you’re trying to prove too much. QA for a software update on those machines is hardly going to justify the cost. But, along with a million other things, I’m sure it was itemized and subitemized, inflated and billed and that’s how we got into this mess.
The fact that doing things in government is much more expensive than people think because you have to go through so many hoops and align so many stakeholders is valid. But in this case, they probably still managed to pay 3-5x more than they should have presumably because of basic incompetence and cronyism. Even though the criticism is imprecise (and you’ve legitimately noted why), it’s still about 80% right.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 58.1 ms ] threadAlso, I saw a social media post from a "founder" yesterday about how his company could have built a CRUD app with the same functionality for much more cheaply. Obviously a lot of people with no government contracting experience armchair quarterbacking the cost angle
US/Canada governments have simply dissolved all in house experience. Which means they have no competent and experienced people who can actually evaluate contract bids. But further, they don't have people in-house with either the experience, competence, or power to make agreed upon changes to contracts on the fly.
And because the contracts are so set in stone, that means even if all the bidders are operating completely ethically, they need to pad their margins significantly to account for anything unexpected. But in reality many bidders are not operating ethically and are able to use a lot of the necessary features of a government bidding process (clearly outlined and transparent contracts with very little subjective input) to maximize their revenue and minimize their output.
It is always odd to read comments like this. Can we assume you will you be challenging this at the supreme court? The government passes laws and so it is odd to state something is "illegal" when it may not be the case. It is also odd because every country has special rules/laws around entry that are NOT the same as the laws inside the country. One of the best examples is our neighbour to the south where the border is considered a "constitutional free zone" - allowing search/seizures which are not permitted elsewhere in the country. Far more likely you disagree with it, but that isn't a legal question.
Many "covid" related actions were challenged, and the supreme court of canada ruled in the governments favour, does that mean the supreme court is also wrong? If so, who do you take your complaint to above this court?
Every country on earth has a legal right to control entry at its borders and while Canada was odd to use ArriveCan, pretty much every country demanded vaccine proof when they reopened their borders. Does this mean they all acted illegally?
The government's job is to protect its citizens, again this is why almost every country enacted some form of border control to try to stop covid, but they are all wrong?
Well the app consisted of users uploading ID and record of vaccination, then without any check, putting a check mark or something on the screen. All of the uploads were stored in a US server and publicly accessible.
But nothing beats the hero in Ontario that made according to local news stations made fool out of the local government by building stairs in a park for $550 when it was going to cost an outrageous $65k (in the end $10k I think). I think about these stairs[1] whenever someone without experience claims they can make things cheaper.
[1] https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/888034787834855424
I bet the development effort was small and cheap, and the least expensive part.
Why did you pay $2 billion for this airport? Most buildings cost less than $1 million!
There is no way you’re going to fix this otherwise.
Or you can install someone at the top who cares and is accountable and can be terminated for such gross mismanagement of funds.
But That’s not gonna happen^
> Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Rangle, said his firm could likely have built the app in less than a month for about $250,000.
> “This is a very simple app,” he said.
Having used ArriveCan I would agree with his quote. It is a very simple app, but what is not simple is writing the specification for it. The contractors weren't given the app and told "how long would it take you to make this?". They were approached to develop "an app to monitor COVID risk at the border", then they had to work with probably several committees, all with different visions and expectations, all trying to get their idea executed.
That's often the part that people forget in favour of easy criticism. ArriveCan is simple, but the process that built it is not, there was no equivalent in the wild that could be used for inspiration, it had a bunch of translation requirements, and needed to interface with existing airport arrival systems.
I'm not saying we should be proud of our government for making a 54M$ CRUD app that, as far as we can tell, did not have much of an impact on COVID being spread, but interviewing a bunch of "IT leaders" and acting as if they would actually sign a contract to build ArriveCan for 250k$ is disingenuous and the Globe and Mail should be ashamed of framing it this way.
Something like ArriveCan requires the collaboration of several branches of government and ties in with a system that monitors over 2M arrivals in our country every month. Even all the doers attitude in the world won't change the fact that they won't just give you access to those databases without some pretty extensive review.
Just think of the QA needed on the arrival machines at the airport, you can't afford to have them all be out of order because they handle much of the incoming traffic, so the "ArriveCan update" has to be thoroughly tested so that it does not cause any significant downtime. This is the exact opposite of the "move fast and break things" environment.
To summarize, I do think that ArriveCan (the program) was a waste of money, but I think the program itself did not waste money. It's the price that comes with building multi-systems applications.
First, I fully agree with everything you said. It wasnt the best use of money, but these people fail to grasp what it takes to build a system integrated with the government. Dealing with any large org requires a lot of back and forth with contracts, legal, etc and the government is worse as they have entire organizations which seem to be created specifically to slow things down.
Second, your points are most likely falling on deaf ears. All they see is "simple CRUD app costs $54M" and can never see past this, have next to zero experience dealign with large orgs or their complexity, requirements, etc.
The fact that doing things in government is much more expensive than people think because you have to go through so many hoops and align so many stakeholders is valid. But in this case, they probably still managed to pay 3-5x more than they should have presumably because of basic incompetence and cronyism. Even though the criticism is imprecise (and you’ve legitimately noted why), it’s still about 80% right.
Canadian gov't IT is extravagantly expensive and inefficient, regardless of who's in power.