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In the UK the intelligence services spent £120M on an "information sharing platform" (email + intranet), before declaring after 3 years work that "technical challenges" made it impossible and the project was canned.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/06/mi5-gchq-co...

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This theme is covered in the book How Big Things Get Done and the shocking revelation was IT projects have the worst history in terms of cost overruns and missed deadlines. Not this specific case iirc.

Nobody will walk to a bridge site and ask them to build twice as many lanes and change one of the endpoints to be in New Jersey instead. IT projects are unique in the absolutely churn of requirements

That, and computer systems have significantly more states, which makes unpredictable states and state transitions more likely.

(Which of course also means that until all eternity the first thing to do when something misbehaves is to try and reset it).

Everything in my country has cost overruns.

My theory is that the country is just too rich for it's own good. Railway tunnel costs a few billion more? Who cares the invoice will be paid and everyone's forgotten the entire affair soon enough.

In third world regions governments collapse, people get shot and the Chinese government wants their money back.

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