[aiiotnoodle]

I agree. Public sector IT becomes a huge sprawl of technologies and cottage industry applications which makes administering these often rarely touched interfaces difficult to do properly when department budgets are tight and resources are busy fire fighting the processes that failed the night before.

It is also difficult to hire because wages are generally low compared to similar roles in private industry, yet they need skilled staff to manage these complex environments. A lot of services don't get the attention they need, not just patching and upgrades but development, requirements capture and usability all kept to a minimum cost to keep the sinking ship afloat.

All these constraints also lean to a culture of poor security, JFDI, rip and replace, insufficent hardware etc... just so the business can operate on whatever computer on wheels in the shipping depot or relatively expensive to replace electronic gate system with intergration to their custom fleet management software.

Government outsourcing to another related body has its cost advantages but the many domain administrator users, the huge flat VmWare estate and the hardware well beyond warranty doesn't dissapear.

Designed to serve immediate needs but without long-term maintenance or holistic design in mind. Outsourcing amplifies the issue.