It was a build-up - prior to that they were less skilled at incompetence, learning from overseas ‘experience’ as others have mentioned enabled them to fast-track their skills in this area, but they had some well earned runs of the short-sightess (and other, notably ‘hair brained’) scoreboards already. Since that time the shell game of ‘what will we call the next big thing that is just a re-stuffup of some previous big thing’ has taken us to a myriad of ‘interesting places’ … sadly under different clothes the soiled undergarments of outsourcing are still there, crawling with life …
I remember one who we called an MBWA - management by walking around. Clearly there was nothing interesting happening in his office, he spent a lot if time in mine and many others. We were eventually outsourced - lots of knowledge went - a few years later it was all taken back in house again … anecdotally a common story …
So in essence, we’ve added another question to the topic - “and who do you trust to implement the computers and software you cannot trust” - answer - nobody …