The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.

You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.

If the government procurement person doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, they are likely to choose the bidder who also doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, and is the low bidder because they don’t realize what they are getting themselves into.

By the time everyone realizes how much more is really required, they are already halfway through the project. The government could have saved money by choosing a more realistic higher bidder to start with. But once they have half a program from the low bidder, throwing that away and starting over doesn’t save any money. Better to just finish with the team that’s invested with the project.

I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.

It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.

And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.

Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.

We did not reach out to Flock for comment on this article, as their communications director previously told us the company will not answer our inquiries until we “correct the record and admit to your audience that you purposefully spread misinformation which you know to be untrue” about this case.

Consider the record corrected: It turns out the truth is even more damning than initially reported.

Burn.