GoKawiilFor over a decade, Alberta’s Ministry of Infrastructure tried to replace two computer systems that were barely limping along.
The first tracks every government-owned building in the province. Roughly 4,000 properties, land titles, and physical assets worth about $12 billion.
The second tracks construction budgets and timelines for every new hospital, school, and government building being built in Alberta. Over 500 active projects at any given time.
Both systems were ancient. The underlying database had reached end-of-life. Staff were manually copying data between disconnected spreadsheets just to answer basic questions about how much a building was worth or whether a construction project was on budget.
To give you a sense of how bad it had gotten: there were employees in both Infrastructure and Technology and Innovation whose full-time job was to copy information from one part of the legacy system and paste it into another. A literal human bridge between two pieces of software that couldn’t talk to each other.
These are dedicated, loyal public servants doing heroic work to keep critical systems running. Some of them couldn’t even take a vacation without putting those systems at risk. They deserved better tools a long time ago.
Since 2016, there had been three separate attempts to replace these systems.
All three failed.
Everyone agreed they needed to be replaced. The questions were: How? When? And who was going to pay for it?
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