"Oracle recommended to the State that it hire Oracle’s own internal consulting unit, Oracle Consulting Services, to play the same role."
I'd like to think that, for projects over a certain size, independent systems integrators who are wholly unaffiliated with the winning vendor would be required for project oversight.
This is in fact often the case, but the number of integrators qualified to handle a large Oracle project is not large, and tends to be the usual lists of suspects such as Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc who are as bad if not worse that Oracle at selling huge consulting contracts and delivering nothing.
This isn't just an Oracle problem - they're obviously over the top in this example, but this seems to be a problem with other vendors as well. I witnessed an example of this in state govt in NC over the last 2 years - loads of promises, under delivered, and as an IT consultant, it was pretty obvious what they were promising was not possible on the time schedule provided. Having tech-knowledgeable external resources to review and look for clarification on muddied points I'd think would be a good thing for the taxpayer and end-users, but they seem to rarely be the focus of these sorts of projects.
Bear in mind that Oracle have tiers of partners. Many of their top-end products have very tight requirements around who can be accredited to work on them and still get support from Oracle for problems. Those partners pay a considerable amount of money to Oracle for the partner program and certification. They are not on your side.
I'd like to think that, for projects over a certain size, independent systems integrators who are wholly unaffiliated with the winning vendor would be required for project oversight.