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When the GAO looked back at the ten most critical federal systems flagged for modernization in 2019, only three had crossed the finish line six years later. The reason for a 70% failure rate, unfortunately, is that most modernization contracts reward maintenance over completion. So a vendor's natural incentive is to keep moving the finish line slightly out of sight. This way, programs never finish. It is the math of a vendor model refusing to kill their golden goose because roughly eighty cents of every IT dollar goes to keeping old systems breathing. If you can change what the contract pays for, however, or find vendors that will give you software as an outcome with strong maintenance guarantees at low residual cost, you would hand many organizations back their own software and help them run smoother and more efficiently.