So if they are serious about this, why does their shitty new jobsearch website require CVs to be uploaded in .doc or docx formats?
Because not everything happens at once, especially in government. Nor is the public sector is famous for agile development.
Government, by its nature, is bureaucratic. When we're on the the receiving end of government services, we often perceive the bureaucracy as ponderous and inefficient. That's because accountability is a big part of the system. I've worked in government IT alongside some really progressive, dedicated and talented people where we had a clear mandate, ample funding and few political enemies. I figure in this best case scenario we spent 80% of our time on project tracking and accountability.
See, you never have to turn a profit in government. But you will be audited. You'll be asked to show the work you've done and justify it. Knowing that the audit is coming, you make friends with the auditors and ask them what controls need to be put in place. Since you have to be in compliance eventually, that's the most efficient course of action, but it adds a chunk of overhead up front. There may be several auditing bodies: one for finance, one for security, one for privacy, one for ethics, one for affirmative action. And of course there are other controls to make you accountable to your boss, and he to his boss and so on.
But you're also accountable to your colleagues. Unlike in the private sector, there's no such thing as "good enough". As a business owner, I can decide to launch a product at any moment I decide the time is right. No matter how broken it may be and no matter whether the market is ready for it or not, that's my exclusive decision. Not so in government. All it takes is someone at a meeting to raise the idea of a unit test that could possibly be done and suddenly you're on the hook to do it. This is not because your colleague can tell you what to do, but because his comments were minuted and those minutes were circulated to all the stakeholders - which includes your department head, who is now responsible to ensure that if anyone in future ever asks about that unit test, you will be able to give him the test logs. And let me tell you, half of all government workers are worry warts. They sincerely think that coming up with new things to worry about is a positive contribution to a project. To be fair, sometimes it is.
See how it works? Now, along comes a new mandate which says not merely to "evaluate" open source but to "prefer" it. People who are running projects that have already done their initial requirements gathering and compliance controls and are now onto architecture and design, what are those people going to do? Their first reflex is not going to be to go back to the drawing board. Not in a million years. Their first reflex is going to be to hold a series of meetings to show due diligence in evaluating whether or not the project now underway is subject to the new open source mandate.
On the other hand, any new project to come along is going to be subject to the open source mandate. People who don't like it will privately grumble but they'll go along. People like me who've been waiting for the mandate will happily embrace it. And then it's payback time. We'll be the people in the meetings raising the questions about due diligence in respect of open source compliance. We'll be the ones suggesting cost and performance controls for existing projects so that in future we can measure their value against comparable open source projects.
Open source will win out. Open Document Format will eventually win out. On merit, mind you. You just have to understand that government moves very slowly and cautiously. But once it becomes a matter of policy you can take it to the bank that these things will happen.