Re: Why do government projects fail?
One word.
Politics.
Where reality and response are rarely seen together, as ideology gets in the way. The classic example of this, writ large, is the Alice-in-Wonderland approach to drugs, whereby the response is far out of proportion to the harm. Something experts (paid by the government) have repeatedly pointed out.
With regards to IT, it depends what the original (political) premise was.
It use to be held up as a paradigm of "government" IT gone wrong - the Nimrod fiasco. Rooted in the fact that the [Labour] government of the day had to posture about buying a "British" solution, even though (a) the RAF wanted AWACS and (b) AWACS was readily available, whereas Nimrod was vapourware. Cue a decade of bunfighting (3,000 + annual specification changes - or 10 a day), as the RAF insisted on benchmarking Nimrod against their requirements (which AWACs satisfied) and Nimrod kept failing. In the 1980s (when I studied it for a module in my degree) the £3billion wasted was unheard of. Nowadays £3billion won't buy half a non-working Universal Credit system.
Oh, and no government project has *ever* failed. Cancelled. Respecified. Replaced. Renewed. Yes. But if you look carefully, no government project has ever failed, or been classed as failed. even GDS will be written up as "unsatisfactory", "unable to meet expectations", "unable to deal with updated requirements", yes, yes, yes. But "failed" ? Never.