Not saying that it doesn't happen in the private sector. But companies that are stuck on inertia and don't adapt, don't tend to fare particularly well. IBM was one of the most powerful companies in the world, now it's just a laughable shell of it's former self. Microsoft had it's time in the sun before the shift to mobile devices and cloud service gutted it's hold over over the computing space and left them scrambling to try to adapt to the world today. At some point or another it will be Google and Apple's turn to fall from the throne as technology marches on.
The public sector is insulated from suffering that kind of failure. In some ways it's good; there's no real way to run a police or military force at a profit, but both are vital. But in other ways it's problematic when major failures occur and the consequences of such are are just shrugged off.
> uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation".
Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so.
Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2].
The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense.
All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate.
Just going to toss in my own anecdotes but not so much productive but surprisingly inefficient. My current employer is currently contracted for the federal government and it's painful to do anything.
Just an example, I put in a request to order a $40 network module to replace a failed one. On our side it's already painful enough, I had to get approvals from 3 different managers that have to align all of the budgeting before bringing it forward to the federal government's representative for approval. The rep in tern has to bring it to his bosses for approval as well.
Typically this takes 12 weeks but this was put in as a critical priority because this was impacting about a hundred people. Probably costing the federal government (cause they're footing the bill) about $12,500 a week in lost productivity because our teams can't do their job properly. Thus their director got to it in a blazing fast 4 weeks.
$40 part. $50,000 in lost productivity because they couldn't get a $40 approval for done faster then 4 weeks.
The other anecdote I've had is with the Canadian Firearms Center in Miramichi. For those that are unaware, Canadians are required to be licensed under a federal program to own a firearm privately. Miramichi handles much of the paperwork for firearms registration. This was a while ago but last time I saw, they were still manually entering in data from paperwork but also from electronic submission as well. Stuff that could be readily automated and something I demo'd in an afternoon.
As it turns out, the inefficiency is intentional because there's a very real fear among the line staff of job reductions if they get too productive per person. And there's not many jobs in Miramichi that pay as well as the federal government (or at least that was the case when I was visiting there probably 20 years ago). So unfortunately there is justification to be as inefficient as possible. But it's always left me wondering how much how much further this attitude extends to other government departments.
The public sector is insulated from suffering that kind of failure. In some ways it's good; there's no real way to run a police or military force at a profit, but both are vital. But in other ways it's problematic when major failures occur and the consequences of such are are just shrugged off.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-iss... $2.4 billion for a federal HR pay system that still doesn't work.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-... $2 billion for a gun registry database that ultimately had to be dismantled because no one could find any evidence that the accomplished the goal of making Canadians safer.