Often times, these legacy systems were custom built, as far as the applications go. Decades of institutional knowledge that is documented no where, without the

Often times, these legacy systems were custom built, as far as the applications go. Decades of institutional knowledge that is documented no where, without the application running, no one could replicate it. Couple that with all the other systems that are integrated to read and write from the 'legacy' system. Couple that with the fact that the government has almost no in-house development talent for most agencies. Couple that with the fact that they don't have someone that can understand and articulate the requirements to a vendor. What you end up with is an open-ended pay-as-you-go contract that runs up into the billions. Oops! This field was supposed to be 16 bytes, not 32, so there was an undetected buffer overflow on some down stream system and now your last 6 months of transactions were invalid? Oops, the government didn't specify 16 bytes in the contract, so the fault isn't on the vendor because they have no control over the downstream? Rinse, repeat. It's a real boondoggle out there.