I had a government job and my boss loved me for doing automation stuff. All of the documentation and data requirements seemed to be written as though a person had to manually do everything -- like they expected a human brain to be making decisions at every step of the process.

It just reeks of a lack of care not only for the power of automation systems, but disrespect for the people who have to do that work. Design your processes in such a way that easy stuff can be done easily and important stuff can be done by people who have some authority.

This is my biggest (personal) problem with bureaucracy. "You have to do it this way because it's the only way _I_ know how to do it, and I don't care if you know a better way, because you don't get paid enough to have good ideas."

A few years ago I had a brain-numbingly monotonous "navigate here" then "click here" then "record output here" type job. Unfortunately, mine was on a military base and the "record output here" was an Access database. I tried to automate the whole process in Access, but military restrictions prevented me from automating most of the process.