There are multiple layers to the woes bedeviling government IT (and government work in general). The contract award process is indeed broken and often awards c

There are multiple layers to the woes bedeviling government IT (and government work in general). The contract award process is indeed broken and often awards contracts to the large fish who fail regularly. Part of that is because 'prior performance' carries signifiant weight, meaning that if you're Lockheed Martin and you've done a 15000 user enterprise resource planning project before you have a leg up on the 50 person IT shop that hasn't, even if said IT shop is far more competent. But really before you even get to the contract, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the full time government employees making the IT decisions are flat out incompetent. The contractor might have smart people that can do excellent work but if the FTE continually makes bad strategic decisions the best coders in the world are not going to be able to deliver a great system. The original article goes a little bit into that where it talks about how technical people in government don't have the power. Another problem is that government people are rarely held accountable for their failures. They in turn often don't hold contractors accountable. Then there's the fact that the government has systematically reduced the amount of full time employee programmers in favor of contractors. That isn't necessarily bad in some ways, but basically it results in the government paying a lot more money to get the same technical expertise. The argument is usually, "Yeah but we don't have to pay for a contractor's benefits." Yet the government is paying 2 or more times the cost of a full-time employee per year for the contractor bill rate. I think for government IT to truly improvement there needs to be some serious structural changes to the way government work is done from contract awards to employee accountability to the composition of the government work force. It really will need to come from the top, and unfortunately the people at the top usually don't make things like that their priority which is why we're here today.