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Comment by kfk | Hacker News Reader

The mess is probably on both sides. The issue is that management doesn't care about IT until everything breaks apart. This means IT is seen as cost and not worth the trouble to do well and keep in house. Then of course everything starts falling apart and it's easier to put the fault on the vendors. Of course IBM has its faults, but I'd guess they are more on the overselling side (we can do everything and cheaper and better!) than on the pure technical side.

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The contracting company who provides the IT people likewise views IT as a cost and not worth the trouble to do well. Only small companies give a damn about technical things. The contracting companies view their value proposition as mountains of documents, tons of forms, processes, ISO9001 certifications, etc. The people who write software or work with hardware? All they do is type. Their work isn't important in any of this.

>The issue is that management doesn't care about IT until everything breaks apart. This means IT is seen as cost and not worth the trouble to do well and keep in house.

It won't make any difference if they had an inhouse team.

In order to choose a competent vendor, or to hire a competent employee the management itself needs to be sufficiently tech savvy to differentiate between mediocre and good candidates.

IBM has no incentive to oversell:

> "IBM Canada was the only company to bid on the government's pay modernization project known as Phoenix."

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