These ridiculous prices are common in enterprise, not just the public sector. You just rarely hear about it when a bank spends 100 million on something that should have been build for 10 in the perfect world. One of the reasons you hear about this in the public sector is actually because we have systems to combat corruption. We don’t just hand out contracts to who we want, to get a public contract you go through a process called procurement, which typically requires a lot of upfront work both for the project but also legally and you have no idea if your bid is gonna to win.

It’s a lot more complicated of course, and one of the reasons is the massive bureaucracy. It’s both good and bad, on one hand it protects us from a public sector that buys software from sketchy people who go “I can do that 100 million project for 10”, exactly like I just did, and then completely fail to deliver. That’s not something you can do in enterprise, that whole move fast and break things simply doesn’t work when your results need to hold up in elections every four years.

Of course this exclusion of small agile companies who can’t afford to play into the public procurement system, means the companies who win the contracts are capable of milking us. Because the truth is, that we don’t get they alternative you think about. No one actually submits a 10 million bid for that 100 million system. Instead we’ll get a 93 million and a 86 million bid, and then we pick the 86 million one.

Typically less than 20% or the money goes to actual development though. The vast majority goes into whatever project management, governance, process modelling, lean, implementation strategies, training and all that other bullshit software companies sell you. And then 5 years later they fail to deliver and it ends up costing 10 million extra.

We really need a new model for this, and that’s where you and I probably agree, but it’s just not going to happen when not a single elected official in a country knows how to code.

All this bureaucracy does not seem to have stopped corporations like Oracle and IBM from legally stealing taxpayer dollars.

If anything, the bureaucracy is creating corruption. The money is going straight into the pockets of billionaires and thereby exacerbating the centralization of wealth, creating monopolies, reducing consumer options, and replacing good useful jobs with useless office jobs.

If you've ever run a large IT program before, you'd know that software development is probably less than half the cost and probably less than half of that will be on the core problem. There's a ton of governance involved in rolling out a system like this plus all the training, maintenance, operations, etc that all has to be done with full indemnity against failures. I could write a system to save text and images in a weekend, but that wouldn't make it Facebook.