I agree with the author that the big failure point was the "triumph" that resulted in a new fully-separate department, before any of the covid-triggered failure

I agree with the author that the big failure point was the "triumph" that resulted in a new fully-separate department, before any of the covid-triggered failures or new development. You've lost at that point. You can't make it me against you, in-house software vs everybody else, you have to share the pain and credit. Otherwise only you feel the pain and any of your "wins" will be improvements that require time and expense from other departments without them getting anything tangible comp- or recognition-wise in exchange. Let alone getting into the "this means the jobs of people I employ to do it manually in the old system will be gone" aspect, which the author touches on too. (And I imagine that even the big failures during Covid maybe weren't as terribly critical to them as to the dev team because of how low-volume the industry was.) "When there just is no interest in actually improving things, I should leave it at that. " Yep, if you can't convince them to care about and drive the improvement themselves, you're gonna have a hard time if driving it becomes the most important thing to you.