The reporting of IT projects and particularly failures in the public sector can be misleading, by implying wrongly that it's the computer specialists to blame.
Failures rarely in fact have anything to do with the IT professionals. A comment made by a reader to Silicom.com sums up what sometimes happens on government IT projects that fail to meet expectations.
"Failure starts at the top. Having seen government IT from the inside I found that the real problem was that the administrators who were in control of the money dictated the requirement. Experts were "On tap not on top" and since administrators did not understand the technicalities the project started on the wrong path. The programming was isolated from the user so the result bore no relationship to the actual day to day need. Getting the private sector involved only worsened the situation since no matter how good their response to the project they were delivering what was demanded not what the users required."