A factor here that might be overlooked (and I'm not making excuses for the bad process you're describing) is that changing business processes means re-training

A factor here that might be overlooked (and I'm not making excuses for the bad process you're describing) is that changing business processes means re-training all your non-technical staff (and everything that comes with that - training materials, manuals, forms, public-facing processes, etc). In a unionized environment like the Canadian federal government, that would likely incur not only a fairly high cost (but less than a failed technology project for sure), it's also a massive HR undertaking that business-side managers and leaders want to avoid at all costs. So they'd rather push all that work onto the technology teams to ensure process remains the same, even if it's the wrong thing to do. My personal anecdote on this: years ago in a past job, I led a team that worked on a project for Bell Canada to build a retention portal for their call centre agents, and the requirements were full of crazy and sub-optimal flows and features, and every single one we questioned was justified with "any other way would require too much re-training of unionized call centre staff". In one case, for a call centre in New Brunswick, the union actually had a clause that major process re-training could only be done every 2 years, regardless of cost.