There is probably a lot of waste. There is probably a lot of waste in any large organization. Waste is probably never generated intentionally - the build up of rules and regulations over time, leaving old systems in place when new ones are adopted, abandoning old systems but never cleaning them up...all of it happens when organizations try to evolve. My whole job for the last 5 years or so has mostly involved cleaning up the waste and mess of a huge system that changed multiple times over its history but never put in place ways to decommission the old methods when the new ones were implemented. In the last week I have deleted 1.4 terabytes - with a T - of unused data from employees who no longer work here but nobody ever bothered to clean out their personal files when they left. That's just in the last week. Nobody ever intended this data to pile up, but I've found over time doing this that it's a lot easier to end something and move on than it is to end something, clean it up, and then move on. The same thing happens with new systems - it's a lot easier to end an old way of doing things without cleaning it up. Easier, that is, until you realize how much you're actually paying for the residual of the old system. So yeah - it's easy to look at something and say "what a waste!" until you realize that waste in a system is unintentional and that its cleanup can be more expensive than just allowing it to continue.