They fail on ownership, pace, and the absence of anyone whose job it is to make the decision. I've spent thirty years on that problem, and the last twenty building a firm around it.
I founded NextGen Consulting in 2006. For most of those years the work was modernisation: tax, licensing, regulatory and public-service systems for federal, state and local agencies. Large programmes, many stakeholders, long timelines — the kind where the technology is rarely the hard part.
The hard part is always the same. Fragmented ownership. Approvals that nobody is accountable for. A plan that everyone agrees with and no one is executing. Programmes don't usually collapse; they stall, quietly, while everyone involved is working hard.
What we build now is a response to that. NGOS is the system the firm runs itself on — capture, proposal, staffing, compliance, delivery — with AI drafting throughout and a human approving anything that matters. NEMS is the governance layer around it: controlled documents, maker-checker approval, risk, audit, corrective action.
The design principle is narrow and I'd defend it anywhere: the rules that matter belong in the database, not in application code. Code can be changed by a well-meaning engineer on a deadline. A constraint cannot. No one approves their own work. Nothing is released that wasn't cleared. Every action leaves a record of who took it.
We built it for ourselves before we offered it to anyone else. Five hundred–odd controlled documents and the whole of our own operation run on it. That isn't a marketing position — it's the only honest way to sell an operating discipline.
BearingPoint, as a director in the high-technology practice, running global resource operations — ten thousand consultants and subcontractors, thirty-plus managers, thirty million dollars a month in subcontractor spend. At that scale you stop believing in individual brilliance. What holds is the system underneath.
IBM, formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers, where I led the Year 2000 global infrastructure assessment for the International Air Transport Association across more than fifteen countries. A hard deadline that could not be argued with, critical infrastructure in four regions, and no possibility of a partial answer. I have never had a better education in what institutions do when the date is real.
Accenture — then Andersen Consulting — where I started, on federal systems integration.
And WebBiz, which I founded and ran from 2002, building offshore delivery across the US, Canada, the UK and Australia before most American consultancies had accepted that global delivery would work at all.
Thirty years, and the question hasn't changed. Only the tools have.