Welcome to the world of large legacy systems developed for and used by organizations that don't understand IT, and don't know that they don't understand IT. Th

Welcome to the world of large legacy systems developed for and used by organizations that don't understand IT, and don't know that they don't understand IT. The good news is there's always a contractor willing to promise the world and deliver something that doesn't work in 5-10 years. Your internal team, who could have finished the original job in a couple years if they'd been funded, will be the ones that end up making that delivered system actually work. But you'll tell everyone that it was the contractor's high quality output that did the trick, because saying they failed would hurt your career. In 15-30 years the system will get replaced and your successor will hear about how great <contractor> did the first time, and they'll get another shot at failure.