I have spent a significant portion of my career working not on government from the outside, as a consultant or an academic, but from the inside, embedded within regulatory institutions and public agencies across Nigeria. What I have seen, repeatedly, is the same pattern: a technology project arrives, receives considerable fanfare, and is quietly abandoned within a year. The dashboard nobody looks at. The portal nobody uses. The system that requires three IT support calls to log in.
The reason is rarely the technology itself. The technology, usually, is fine. The reason is that the people who built it never spent time understanding how the institution actually works. They spoke to directors, not to the officers who would do the daily data entry. They designed for a hypothetical user in a stable environment, not for an officer on night shift with intermittent internet and no IT training.
What works
There are three things I have observed consistently in the government technology projects that do work. First, they are built around tools people already know. The learning curve is low enough that adoption happens naturally. Second, they are designed with the people who will use them, not presented to them after the fact. Third, they have internal champions: people within the institution whose job, informally, is to keep the system running and bring colleagues along.
The 1864 Institute was created to build exactly this kind of technology. Not the kind that impresses in a boardroom presentation and dies in the field. The kind that officers and public servants actually open every morning because it makes their work easier. That is a harder thing to build. It is also the only thing worth building.