"Failure is not an option"

After I wrote about the Irish project last week, more press here on large IT project failures in the public sector. We can offer reasons - could just be the pig moving through the boa constrictor - since government is usually a late IT adopter, and the massive IT failures in the private sector in late 90s are finally showing up in this sector?  Could also be that governments are used to big public works projects and think they can handle large IT projects better than the private sector?

But as an industry, as we see Valley entrepreneurs show ridiculous economics in developing new "innovation"  technologies, how can we keep allowing governments to keep running over budget on more mature "utilities" projects? Forget about failure and overruns- even the economics to start with need to be scrutinized. Sounds like significant "crunching" opportunities in the sector.