The reason it was successful is because the right incentives were in place for the people doing the work. Digital or not, the fundamentals are the same.
The public sector, in particular governments, have a long history of creating bad incentives or misaligning the incentives. The root causes of this are severalfold.
The article mentions corruption (in softer words) and lack of expertise on the government side. But there is little talk about the quality of suppliers.
1. Competency Gap: Public sector organizations don't have the right people of the right quality as part of the organization with the right skill-set to not only do the project, but even to appropriately evaluate vendors. Entire books could be (and have been) written on this topic, but the competency gap is now so bad in the public sector that they're not even capable of hiring the right people, and therefore it is intractable for them to ever solve this problem.
2. Misaligned Organizational Incentives: Public sector acquisition rules disallow the public sector from forcing companies to take losses except under very narrow conditions, this type of cost-plus modeling, even on what would otherwise be a fixed-priced contract, incentivizes external entities to milk the government teat for all its worth rather than delivering on time and under budget.
3. Misaligned Personal Incentives: Public sector projects are inherently politic, and are rife with corruption and abuse. Going beyond the obvious, this also exacerbates point 1 above, because anyone involved in a public sector project that's not either naively selfless or an idiot will take a private sector job at a many times multiple of their public sector pay to do the exact same work on behalf of the selected vendor. In fact, the revolving door of public sector / private sector is a form of blatant but "legal" corruption that exists effectively globally without much comment from anyone.
If I was being pithy, the short answer is that at least in the US, and most of the West, Boomers broke the government to exploit it for their own personal greed, and by violating the social contract made it a toxic place for anyone who isn't similarly interested in the grift from being involved in.
The responsible public servants aren't competitively paid and vetted or that they lack expertise.
I'm sure governments can find expertise in universities, technological institutes etc.
Point 2 seems crazy to me.
Fixed priced contracts should specify exactly what the goals and requirements are. Obviously if more is asked down the line, then there's grounds for negotiation.
I don't understand how governments aren't allowed to operate on this basic principle like everyone else.
