"It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost."
....
"Joel Spolsky recently spoke at Y Combinator about selling software to corporate customers. He said that in most companies software costing up to about $1000 could be bought by individual managers without any additional approvals. Above that threshold, software purchases generally had to be approved by a committee. But babysitting this process was so expensive for software vendors that it didn't make sense to charge less than $50,000. Which means if you're making something you might otherwise have charged $5000 for, you have to sell it for $50,000 instead.
The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much."
"If you're hard enough to sell to... the only people who will sell to you are companies that specialize in selling to you. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency."
Well quite.
I would have thought that the purpose of the committee is to act as a brake on the implementation of new software, due to concerns about the total cost of ownership, duplication, inability to share data across applications etc. "Free" software has a cost not least in less visible ways which may far exceed the cost of purchase.
I am not arguing that all this caution is correct, just that many corporate procedures are set up for other than their apparent purpose.