less well funded

They don’t have to be. Legislators can, you know, funding the fucking departments that need it. But that’s an entirely different subject…

By contrast, most commercial enterprises can pivot to line their processes up with whatever the industry common practice is.

Not always. Sometimes it’s pivoting to whatever is making them the most money. Or eating their own dog food to prove their product, even if that product sucks.

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.

Yes, it is incredibly expensive, and sometimes these huge corporations think they can just do it the same way they did it with State X and hope that State Y can just map terms. And then they crash and burn hard because they don’t understand that state laws are different, and sometimes you have to put in effort and time and money to actually get a working product. Corpos want to put in the least amount of work and money to get as much profit as possible from governments, and some of them have been burned so badly by that mentality that they look for better solutions. Often, there’s not any great solutions and their infrastructure suffers.

the government bean-counters didn’t tell you about a bunch of the nitpicky requirements up front

Have you even seen a government RFP? They tell you. Every. Single. Requirement. In detail, in triplicate, in sometimes unreasonable or unrealistic terms, under 800+ pages that a team of experts need to pour over and that’s before there’s even any sort of contract negotiation that requires the team of lawyers.

Source: I work for a company that comes in after companies like Oracle have fucked up so royally that governments are begging for a quality product