I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between organisations. For example, the proces

I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between organisations. For example, the process of making retail purchases and delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other major retailer. But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual, manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll eventually get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they'll manually match the payment up with the invoice. A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong building. Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job would seem pointless.