I'm painfully familiar with some of this.

My favorite example of just how dysfunctional it all is was an agency which made a small fuss about how they were modernizing by allowing online job applications 10+ years ago.

Behind the scenes the applications were simply emailed to a shared mailbox then printed out and re-entered by hand into the actual position management system.

The position management system was so dated and overloaded that the folks entering data had learned how long they could expect to wait (measured in minutes to tens of minutes) when moving between a given set of screens. They would submit one screen then work on something else.

Eventually, the agency spent an enormous amount of money implementing some combination of systems from SAP to consolidate / replace everything.

Now the same folks who were retyping resumes are cut and pasting them into a series of webforms and emailing around spreadsheets of all the information that the system lacks forms for.

Hiring managers who had little or no input on requirements for new system don't even log in, they request printouts from HR.

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Having seen things like this play out a few times now I have a few ideas about what could help one of these projects actually succeed:

* Generate or at least inform requirements with honest information from people at the ground level. Those people toiling away filling up manilla folders and doing data entry know the actual process. The farther up the chain you go the story will move away from reality toward what's effectively nothing more than the way things are supposed to work.

Problem is, the layers of management don't want to allow that kind of access and will retaliate against their subordinates for being honest. Also, those low-level people are likely aware enough to know that they're talking themselves out of a job.

I think the former requires a powerful and attentive enough personality leading the effort to simply bulldoze the managers. I wonder if the latter can't be addressed by buying everyone out with generous severance or early retirement. It would puts a cap on the cost of these broken jobs and processes rather than continuing to cycle people ad money through them.

* As a rule, the technical and procurement staff of these agencies aren't competent to generate requirements or evaluate what's produced when dealing with outside contractors and implementers. At the same time, the agencies don't pay enough or move fast enough to maintain a competent internal staff.

This is really hard. Hiring outside experts seems to actually work against the goal as they will invariably work more for some particular vendor than the agency.

Big companies absolutely collude and actively work to hold down smaller competitors so "competitive" anything doesn't really work.

One idea I've been kicking around is a sort of a open source template for government system/project requirements. It would be a easy to follow "test suite" which proposals could be compared against. It would raise flags or fail plans and terms which don't meet the standard of contributors with domain knowledge.

I'd like to write more on this, but I've got a few things to handle this evening.