[JBlue42]

It's interesting how we have decades of knowledge and experience that sales people typically blow smoke up the execs you-know-what and fail to deliver to various degrees yet those execs are still gung-ho on implementing expensive 'solutions'. I've seen it where the people below them that have to do the day-to-day work on it have other ideas but are then forced to use these platforms and explain it to those execs, and why they may not be working.

I wonder if it's because some of those at the mid-to-level making these decisions are under the same market pressures as the rest of us to show they've actually 'done sometime' - so they can slap this on a resume and prepare it for an interview when they roll out of the org in a year or two after implementation. This seemed to be the history in the IT department at the hospital I worked out where they had a decade of zombie projects that sorta worked because they were implemented, barely supported, and the persons that made the decision had bounced to something else, leaving IT holding the bag.

[rustybelt]

"I wonder if it's because some of those at the mid-to-level making these decisions are under the same market pressures as the rest of us to show they've actually 'done sometime'"

Definitely true. Also don't discount the influence of good old fashioned corruption - cash kickbacks, job promises, gifts, etc., I've seen IT contracting decisions so dumb that graft is far and away the most logical explanation.