Changing systems means having to do massive amounts of retraining of staff, the potentials of lost productivity during the migration if/when the system goes dow

Changing systems means having to do massive amounts of retraining of staff, the potentials of lost productivity during the migration if/when the system goes down, etc. Plus you're going to have to find someone who can convert the old records to the new format, have a path of converting new to old if something goes wrong, etc. So, governments, like any entity, continue to use the old systems because the projects to convert them are inevitably multi-year and multi-million dollar projects that may not even completely work. While many users would like to move off the systems, the replacements may indeed be much more expensive than they can budget for.