I once visited a construction site where the contractor’s headquarters had commissioned a tech company to build an on-site quality-inspection application. The developer had admitted to the site engineer that they had never set foot on a construction site before. The engineer showed me what he was actually using: his own phone camera and an Excel sheet. The new app did not map to how work actually happened on site.

This is not an isolated story. The vendor builds something technically coherent but operationally disconnected. The client, somewhere up the chain, had fallen in love with the idea of the solution before anyone had built an honest business case for it.

The result is a tool that gets demonstrated at a board meeting but isn’t used in the field.