Comment by acdha

Contracting IT services at that level overpays by a whole number multiple for worse results because the government doesn’t have the in-house expertise to tell when the contractor is doing something wrong. (This is one reason why many construction projects go over budget: someone saved by laying off the engineers, so they pay 2-3x more for contractor A to oversee contractor B, guaranteeing 3+ party disputes for every problem)

What does work better is outsourcing an entire function: if you pay Gmail for email services, you know exactly how much it will cost per user and have an SLA for problems which they can’t blame on you.