To build on Professor Clarke's remarks, I think the pattern you see in a lot of public sector IT work is that if you imagine a large project that has 100 public servants working on it, 90 of them will be writing Word documents that are project management, oversight compliance reports, all sorts of things that are not actually building the software. If you have 100 people and only, maybe, five of them are actually writing software code, configuring systems, that's a really odd ratio that is very normal in public sector IT but just completely foreign if you work at Shopify, Google or another mature tech company. Trying to reduce those barriers that public servants face—oversight and compliance mechanisms that are really outdated—means that you spend less money having 90 people write meaningless Word documents and more people actually building software code.
One understated scandal of public sector IT is that it's very normal for the public service to undertake a $100-million IT project that could have been done for $10 million, or a $30-million IT project that could have been done for $2 million, and so there's this expectation that it's normal to have a $50-million IT project to build an online forum or an interactive website that could be done for a fraction of the cost.
There's some really great writing from Waldo Jaquith, who's a technologist in the United States, about how software is so much cheaper—it's not free, but it's much cheaper than public sector organizations expect—but the tendency is to say, “Oh, yeah, this project is similar to this previous project our department did. The last one was $50 million, so this one's probably $50 million or $60 million,” when a really strong team could build it for $2 million. That's tricky to dig into because it all has to do with how public servants are doing the work of IT projects, how 90 out of 100 people are just writing Word documents instead of actually building.