Here's the biggest reason that custom software for government costs hundreds of millions of dollars: government simply doesn't know better.
Government employees have spent decades looking into a funhouse mirror, and have lost sight of normalcy. "Sure, $100M is an OK price for a computer program!"
Government employees have spent decades looking into a funhouse mirror, and have lost sight of normalcy. "Sure, $100M is an OK price for a computer program!"
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The very same corporates where this idea came from - don't you guys think government should be led like a corporate, mmmhhh ?
And where the money goes (google Deloitte for recent related news, for example)
Projects are in the fanciest semi-recent technology (think 3-5 years old) to "attract the talents" that then, before even adding any new feature, will migrate/rewrite everything because the former techno is not supported any more.
Rinse and repeat
https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america
And sometimes you pay to change landlords.
And sometimes the landlords sue you for not considering their offer strongly enough.
But sometimes it irritates me. There's a piece of mail merge software we used (which starts with M and ends in b) that we pay, I think, $80 per seat for; I could replicate it in Power Automate in a day.
Here is standard SW you could get for $100K but for your government agency it is $10 million.
We need smarter people in gov, that requires a different vision of working in the gov and money.
Our IT support went from OK to awful within like 3 months.
So your point about outsourcing is spot on.
I just think we need to change the government jobs narrative IMHO.
We like to put down government employees and then complain they are not doing great work. My main point is let's make government jobs prestigious.
My big thing is ‘Need more technically minded CORs’
1st, costs almost exclusively labor hourly + markup 1/3