Indeed. I know it doesn't look like it sometimes, but the purpose of Government is to prevent Tragedy of the Commons, and to my mind "buy the lowest cost irrespective of value delivered" is very much Tragedy of the Commons when discussing tax dollars.

In a similar way, current stock market behaviour actively encourages "reduce cost at all cost" and there's yer problem. Many companies in the UK have begun moving services back onshore once the revenue impact of the customer backlash started to bite. It's a pit

You'd be amazed at how often companies need someone to blame if something goes wrong.
I work for a datacenter which offers IT services solely to the government in the country I'm in (in Europe) and no, I'm not gonna mention the country because it'd be pretty obvious for whom I work*.

In any case, I often wonder why some decisions are made in terms of hiring external companies or consultants (we have plenty of in-house project managers, programmers, etc.) and sometimes I get the feeling that we need external g

Hiring a company that already knows how to do this stuff is probably a hell of a lot cheaper in the short run than funding a new one.

Why? It is something i see regularly in public services: When you get budgets cuts (generally on the workforce budget line), you spend more on external services/companies to do the same work with worst SLAs. As it is not the same budget line all is ok :(

That sounds perfectly sensible and it's exactly what most companies would do, however it doesn't work in practice for government organizations. Governments have a kind of corrosive ineptitude that creeps into everything they do. I think it's something to do with the fact that no matter how bad they screw up they can't go bust and they can't fire permanent staff.

In some cases it's better to let people who know what they are doing do the work. Even if they are making a fat profit they may still charge less th

The UK Gov actually has the Government Gateway which is a secure system that was meant to be all encompassing.

Originally there was a large budget approved to set up a skeleton network which would eventually be extended to replace the many legacy systems in the NHS and all government departments. I seem to recall that there was a mirrored multi-petabyte storage array for records to begin with.

However, part way through the implementation someone pulled the plug and left a partly implemented system which

And let's face it - why should British taxpayers money go to Google or Amazon when they do all they can not to pay tax in the UK...

Yeah because I'm sure the companies would never negotiate separate data confidentiality policies when setting up services segmented specifically for a government.

Quite. I raised exactly that point in February [cabinetoffice.gov.uk]. I hope that my government does not give my data to the US government.