Men against boys
Having seen this issue from both sides of the fence, it seems to me that when these contracts are negotiated it's a matter of big business stamping all over the Government departments.
I used to work at the court service and it was obvious whoever had negotiated the contract with EDS didn't have the first idea about IT.
For example, moving a dumb terminal from one desk to another cost about £350.
All the systems were slow and eventually when the office I was working in got it's new infrastructure the implementation didn't allow for simple things like putting permissions on server directories. Oh, that's another £350 per directory, per change.
No wonder the finances of this country are in such a mess with massive overspends like this on Gov IT projects. When Gov is not involved, things seem to go much more smoothly.