todrules's Journal: Normal CIO antics or immoral/illegal?

I work for a large, publicly-traded company, and my CIO is friends with the CEO of a small/medium software development company. He seems to want to use this company for a lot of projects, even though they have never delivered a solid project. For example, they tried a chat project. That bombed. Didn't even make it past pilot stage. They tried a Flex app for our CSRs. Well, our real dev team had to go in and rewrite all the code, and when they were done, they were able to get rid of over half the code base. But, even that wasn't enough to save it. Less than a year later, we're redoing it from scratch. So, now, take 2 on the chat project. They way over promised and under delivered - blatant lies. We had to use 2 teams full time for 4 months to finally get the product even slightly usable and was able to deploy it (at times telling them what they were supposed to do and how to code). It's still one of the worst apps I've ever used. Next, they deliver another product, and it actually crashes an entire enterprise-class system on its first day! Hey, at least they got first at something. Now, they come in on even another project, and almost destroy this project by redoing the UI. (We were told by the CIO that we had to use them). Again, they deliver a crappy design and crappy code. It seems that our CIO is just intent on using this company, but it's costing my company millions of dollars, and, I think will be detrimental to the health of my company. Now, is this normal for a CIO to continue to use a company just because they have a friend in the other company, even though they can't deliver? Any suggestions on how to handle this? I really like my company and the people I work with, but I'm at my wit's end when it comes to this issue.