>I see incompetent IT processes and a lack of mandated data retention policies.

Having worked in government for well over a decade now, I can tell you that this is undoubtedly the case. That is not to say all departments have poor practices, but on the whole there is no standardization and each organization does things differently.

I have worked in offices that have NO server archive and everyone relies on PST's, and others where there are server archives but they are limited to 500MB or something small and they just start deleting items by date.