That reminds me of a buklshit project I was involved with at a previous company. The short of it was they wanted some way to exchange articles between affiliated journalism outlets, and so they spent $6+ million to build what was effectively a clone of CouchDB from scratch. No, I am not making that up. I knew how silly that project was from the get-go, but thought nothing of it because, as far as I knew, it was an organizational pet project that didn't cost that much. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted when I was told how much had been spent on it over a period of a few years. I know at least a significant portion of that budget went to some staff engineers, and it wouldn't surprise me that some blood sucking consultants fed from the trough as well. This was clearly one of those things that may have started out as some developers identifying a problem, having fun with it, and then management decided it to throw a bunch of money its way thinking it was going to give them a big name.
I was ordered once (because I had previously ordered my staff to not do this) to have my staff make a certain internal website comply with accessibility requirements. Except the only authorized users were soldiers and airmen who would be discharged if they had any of the disabilities this was for.
They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got sorted out, we had it done.
Apparently, a memo went around that this was required everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made between public-facing websites (where this is true) and this one.
