Govt procurements and failure
Don't forget that most large govt. procurements are awarded after competitive bidding, in which several companies lose at considerable expense (I know, I've been on both winning and losing sides). So not all bidders want to obscure things or make them more difficult, at least not until after contract signature.
One of the main issues in govt IT procurement failure is changing requirements, and politically motivated, but unrealistic requirments. the 'Universal Benefit' being one of the most unrealistic things to do in the time available. Most of the disasters I've personally been involved in were over ambitious projects from a client who really did not know what their existing situation was, where they wanted to be (in anything more detailed than a fluffy cloudy-thought-leadery-wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-it-all worked-like-this way) and wanted the contractors to just make it happen without bothering the client with all those annoying questions like:
"what, exatly does your system do? What data do you have? What are the access requirements on the data? What applications do you run? Who can use those applications? What is your network topology? What servers, operating systems and other software do you use?" etc. etc.
None of this is helped by sales teams whose main motivation is to win the business and get their bonus and leave the delivery team to JFDI.
<and B R E A T H E >
Sorry, rant over.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
