€139 million. Zero working software.

The Court of Audit's report on i-Police reads like a case study in bad governance. A €299 million contract with no milestones and no acceptance criteria. No secured funding. No risk analysis. And a supplier paid €75 million before anyone asked what had been delivered.

I've spent 25 years in Belgian IT, mostly on large public and semi-public systems. I've seen this pattern often enough to call it a pattern.

When you hand an entire programme to a large consultancy, you hand over the one thing you can't buy back: the knowledge of how your own systems work. From that moment the supplier has every incentive to keep the project running and none to finish it. Finishing means the invoices stop.

There's a Belgian twist that makes it worse. Here, the strongest engineers tend to go independent. They can, so they do. What stays inside the big firms is often not the top of the market. So the client pays premium rates for a sales force, a CV database, and whoever happened to be on the bench.

The answer isn't "never use external people". I'm external myself. The answer is where the capability lives.

Software is not a supporting service any more. For a police force, for a health insurer, for a bank, the system is the operation. You don't outsource your operation. You build a core team that knows both the technology and the business, and you keep it. That team owns the architecture, the acceptance criteria, and the right to say "this isn't done".

Once that team exists, external people make it stronger. Specialists, extra hands, someone who has already solved your problem elsewhere. Hire them directly or through a small, honest intermediary. What you don't need is a firm whose main asset is a database of other people's CVs and a legal department that knows how to write a contract without deliverables.

i-Police didn't fail because of one supplier. It failed because nobody on the client side was equipped to hold that supplier to anything. Fix that first. The €139 million was the tuition fee.

First published on LinkedIn.