However, as an Italian, i understand your feelings.
Public administration has always been the land of bureaucratic people that want to see sheets of paper, stamps and signatures.
They’re almost often unfamiliar with technology and they are mostly unwilling to change their workload.
The real problem if very often that upper management is often also old and unfamiliar with technology too, hence incapable of understanding the value that technology could bring hence unwilling to push its adoption.
The tolerance for high salaries in government is basically non-existant. People throw fits in my region about teachers with 30 years experience and the maximum scale making just over $100k/year Canadian (just over $70k/USD). So you can imagine what it's like to try and hire senior developers (five years experience) at around $90k when top of the market is quadruple that and a large number of companies pay double that. The end result is they hire from the bottom 25% of developers, the bottom 25% of product managers and the bottom 25% of managers. Add to that a large dysfunctional bureaucracy and they are lucky if they get people 10% as productive as in competing companies. It's a colossal problem because government routinely fails at building technology and then outsources it at extreme cost. That outsourcing isn't always successful either in part because the requirements hinge on those same Product Managers that government can hire on extremely restricted budgets.
You are being too benevolent. You think progress in bureaucracy is being resisted because those people are "old and unfamiliar", but they actively resist it because their paycheck depends on it. They know if they get fired they are completely useless in the job market.
