[alexose]

Those kinds of inefficiencies are /everywhere/ in government. They tend to mirror the limited ways departments communicate (see: Conway's Law). Having structured data available isn't a given, nor is the ability to send it across networks that often predate the internet.

I remember an incident where a critical feature went down for days because a backhoe severed the only available link between two agencies. It's hard to overstate how unusual it is by government standards to operate the way modern startups do-- e.g., put everything in the cloud and let Amazon handle your availability problems.