Re: This Must Never Happen Again
It depends. As a public sector programme this would have had to have gone through a regulated tender process where any interested suppliers would have had to have mapped the "point in time" business requirements - against the capabilities of the product being recommended for implementation.
I would be highly surprised if the entire process was IT driven only and had no involvement of the end users or business departments.
What I can believe however is : (A) that due to existing workload, the business users or business analysts didn't really take the requirements / process mapping seriously enough, or get enough time with the key parties to review the new system and discuss those overarching business changes. (B) That data migration is hard if the business doesn't really understand its data, how it is used, and where it is silo'd. (C) That even the tea lady generally wants a say in the governance of reports and reporting.