The article is kind of dumb. eg it hangs its hat on the Phoenix payroll system, which

> Phoenix project executives believed they could deliver a modernized payment system, customizing PeopleSoft’s off-the-shelf payroll package to follow 80,000 pay rules spanning 105 collective agreements with federal public-service unions. It also was attempting to implement 34 human-resource system interfaces across 101 government agencies and departments required for sharing employee data.

So basically people -- none of them in IT, but rather working for the government -- built something extraordinarily complex (80k rules!), and then are like wow, it's unforeseen that would make anything downstream at least equally as complex. And then the article blames IT in general. When this data point tells us that replacing a business process that used to require (per [1]) 2,000 pay advisors to perform will be complex. While working in an organization that has shit the bed so thoroughly that paying its employees requires 2k people. For an organization of 290k, so 0.6% of headcount is spent on paying employees!

IT is complex, but incompetent people and incompetent orgs do not magically become competent when undertaking IT projects.

Also too, making extraordinarily complex things they shouting the word "computer" at them like you're playing D&D and it's a spell does not make them simple.

[1] https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_0...