The Awful Customer

“The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it’s GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a ‘better’ customer, it would be able to negotiate better terms and introduce better IT innovations faster into its infrastructures. The fact that the government is, on average, a mismanaged IT laggard is an unambiguous market signal that success has little to do with technical excellence or performance and more to do with the ability to cope with all the costs that serving this kind of client imposes.” Michael Schrage —The Awful CustomerTechnology Marketing)