Both's faults?
Don't get me wrong, this is mainly the fault of the consultants. But, the client should have *some* responsibility.
I mean (not to get into bad analogies), if a plumber came in and said they wanted to run pipes all over the building, stick this cistern over here, oh and pumps, lots of pumps, I would think SOMEONE would ask "Why? We just have this sink here, and a bathroom over here. What is the goal of all this?" See if the answer makes sense. But, for IT, someone can come in and propose virtually anything, and they will not necessarily be questioned about "what is the goal for all this?"
Same thing here -- for ANY project I've proposed as a consultant... I ask what they want to get done, and how they expect to do it. I propose (even if just pen-on-paper ) some mockups to see if this is how they want this to work. I *DON'T* start out saying I'm going to use Python and this and that technology without even saying what the goal of this tech is. This would, for example, avoid the situation from the article where some group ended up with shared folders where they could not share anything with anyone else, and had to FTP to do so. I would have found either people want to share everything on there, and made all directories accesible to others... or found they want to share the odd file, and kept each user's directory private but added a "public to all" directory people could copy files in to to share them.