Just a single data point, but I noticed similar antics even from outside the organization. My company licensed our software to Yahoo for several years, but they stopped using it six months into the contract. The projects kept running and we kept collecting data, but nobody ended up doing anything with the data. Employee turnover in this division seemed like 6-12 months, and to my disbelief the Harvard and Stanford grad managers I interacted with had no idea what was going on or what they were doing.

I certainly don't think the concept of losing scope over the course of an enterprise software license or a project's life cycle is unique to Yahoo, but these corporate inefficiencies have been a serious eye-opener.