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Three traditional tools that form the backbone of government operations: listservs, CRMs, and knowledge bases, were never designed for the realities of public sector work.
Three traditional tools that form the backbone of government operations — listservs, CRMs, and knowledge bases — were never designed for the realities of public sector work. They persist not because they work, but because they're familiar. And that familiarity is costing agencies more than most leaders realize.
Listservs date back to around 1985. That they remain the coordination backbone for elections offices, disaster response teams, and public health agencies today is less a testament to their durability than to how little attention government IT infrastructure has received.
The pitch is that they're free — no budget line item, no procurement process. But the absence of a cost on paper doesn't mean the absence of a cost in practice. Workers already spend over a day a week hunting for information, and listservs make that problem worse by treating a cluttered inbox as a knowledge base. For a 1,000-person agency, that's not an inconvenience — it's millions of dollars a year in squandered capacity.
The coordination failures compound from there. Messages don't arrive. Recipients don't read. Updates get missed. When people do respond, it becomes a noisy reply-all thread that trains everyone to tune out — including when something actually matters. Leaders are left flying blind, and the gaps don't surface until they're already causing problems.
The dominant tool for managing contacts and relationships is the CRM. The problem is that CRMs were built for sales teams, and their design reflects it. One major CRM promises to help users "attract more prospects, close more deals, and strengthen customer relationships." Another aims to be "the sales assistant your team never had."
Government employees don't close deals. They manage overlapping networks of people across dozens of public, private, and nonprofit organizations — and they need to be able to identify the right person, in the right role, for the right initiative, at any given moment. A sales funnel has nothing to do with that.
Consider a state employee coordinating a homelessness reduction initiative. She works with the state public health agency, serves as point of contact for shelter operators, participates in a multi-jurisdictional working group, and sits on the board of a regional convening organization. A CRM would try to place her in a sales funnel that doesn't exist. What she actually needs is a network map — one that captures every role she plays across every context and updates as those roles change.
That kind of ongoing data enrichment is mission-critical for government. The people and organizations public servants need to coordinate with are always changing. A tool with diminishing returns after the deal closes is the wrong tool for work that never ends.
Few tools cause more daily frustration for public servants than the shared drive — the SharePoint instance that grows more chaotic with every passing year, where documents hide behind the wrong search terms and outdated files accumulate alongside the ones you actually need.
The experience is universal. You know a document exists. You try every search term you can think of. When you finally find it, 20 or 30 minutes are gone. Kay Brooks, a policy and program analyst at Oregon Housing and Community Services, calls this "the work to do the work" — the friction between a public servant and the outcome they're trying to deliver. When government employees waste up to 10 hours every week just finding information, public programs don't just slow down. They fail the people depending on them.
Traditional knowledge bases also break at organizational boundaries. Betsy Camara, Pima County's Heat Relief and Response Manager, put it plainly: "We don't have time to constantly approve permissions and juggle a variety of tools to work with our partners to help our constituents." Government work is cross-organizational by nature. Tools that treat the agency as an island don't reflect how the work actually gets done.
Listservs, CRMs, and knowledge bases share the same fundamental flaw: they weren't designed for government. They were adapted from other contexts and asked to carry weight they were never built for. State governments spent about $2.8 trillion in 2023. The coordination infrastructure running those programs should be fit for that purpose.
It shouldn't take 10 hours a week to find a document. It shouldn't take a sales CRM to understand who your partners are. And it shouldn't take a reply-all thread to coordinate a disaster response. The technology to do better exists.
And we’re here to deliver it.
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