With government, you can only complain. So you do.
It took our IT over 4 years to migrate away from Siebel to Salesforce and it's going on 3 years since. I just learned the other day we still have a Siebel DB lingering around as a dirty little secret.
We move away from Lotus Notes over 10 years ago and we still have some Notes Apps used by our Legal Department.
With what's left of your budget, which is now very, very negative. Better to redefine abject failure as success to minimize the chances of it ending your career if you're involved in firm purchasing in any way. It's not like boards of directors have a clue. The big consulting firms will assist pulling the wool and priming the press so they can move onto the next mark. It's impossible to by cynical enough.
People love to shit on Oracle, IBM, etc when they bungle yet another big project that was supposed to fix something.
For instance, I’m happier if I pick my couch and then I’m uncomfortable than if the government picks my couch and I’m comfortable.
My dad was on an Air Force Base when the base commander delegated to his wife picking out all the furniture for the base housing. Naturally, every serviceman's wife hated it.
me: I think we can build something in-house here better than what the vendor will provide, I think the vendor's solution is likely to be a failure for us.
them: Yeah, but if do it in-house and it fails, it's our fault. If the vendor's solution fails, it's their fault -- plenty of very prestigious universities are using this vendor, nobody's going to blame us for choosing them. [Ie, "nobody got fired for picking IBM" basically].
But nary a word from such commentators when a major commercial software product demonstrates yet another catastrophic security failure.