Government information systems in the Pacific are too often ‘built to last’ rather then ‘built for change’, which is the real requirement for them to be.
The traditional approach has been to build very tight vertically integrated systems. This has created unintended ripple effects that cascade across the system whenever a change is made. So what typically should have been a simple update of a business policy, process change or business rules requiring a few hours’ work often times turns into a complex, bureaucratic and code-intensive process that instead takes months of tedious effort to implement.