I mean… the headline is basically wrong. There are plenty of purpose-built tools for public administration, often configured and supported by the same big players (e.g. IBM). I’ve worked with several of them.
But I think the article hints at the real problem:
They are more complex, less well funded, more prone to change as democratic needs evolve
Governments have requirements, often legislative in origin, that making no f*cking sense and that are incredibly tricky to model in software, because they’re written by legislators who have a poor understanding of automation and how to write clear prose. And those requirements change with the stroke of a pen. Keeping up with them means the constant attention of a large team of software developers.
By contrast, most commercial enterprises can pivot to line their processes up with whatever the industry common practice is. Governments rarely have that freedom.
This statement seems incredibly naive to me:
Build an equivalent stack as a conceptual framework for local government needs and processes, and the things they all have in common will create a huge market for sustainable services despite no two organizations being the same.
The entire reason that governments go to companies like Oracle and SAP for help is that building, maintaining, and changing bespoke applications, and the full stacks to support bespoke applications, in a way that is compliant with government-grade change management is incredibly expensive. The entire selling point of tailoring a commercial ERP system is that it should nominally do a pretty good job of handling “the things they all have in common” at least as well as anything you build yourself. The projects still fail because accomodating the stuff that IS different ends up being a bespoke software project all of its own, and because things that appeared to be “in common” turn out to require bespoke configuration, because the government bean-counters didn’t tell you about a bunch of the nitpicky requirements up front.
The prosaically simple explanation for these failures is that companies like Oracle over-promise, but they do that because almost ANY contractor has to over-promise and under-price to get a government contract.
Source: I work for a company like Oracle, and I work on projects for regional governments.