[olau]

Yes! Some organizations are incapable of buying software.

Buying yet-to-be-developed software is easy with the right software company - you just need to provide your problems and priorities, and an open mind and let them manage the process. We do that for our customers, and we have happy customers.

But if you're incapable of choosing a good partner or you let your internal politics dominate the process, then it is extremely difficult. Even with a good development company, a dysfunctional buyer can easily be a factor of 200-500% in lost productivity.

Off-the-shelf software should be easier - you can just try it out. But the wrong organization can easily be incapable of that too, bundling everything up to save money without understanding how much more complex it makes everything and how ill-equipped they are to handle that complexity, never trying things out in practice, writing long spec lists instead, bikeshedding over unimportant implementation details, prioritizing development contract minutia over working systems, putting too many layers between the developers and actual users, going for a big bang.

There are many ways to screw it up.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Software is not about code. Software is a reflection of culture. The code is a means to a social end.

And if everything about a culture is broken - the relationships, the management insight, the goals (collective effectiveness and pride-in-professionalism vs individual ego and greed), the hiring and HR systems, the procurement, the sales - any software that crawls out of the swamp is going to reflect all of that.