Six capabilities, and what they actually cover.

Public-sector workforce management is not commercial HR with the labels changed. Headcount is bounded by sanctioned posts rather than by budget, pay is fixed by published scales rather than negotiated, promotion depends on seniority and evaluation held over decades, and the service record has to outlive every system it has ever been kept in.

A request that moves between desks on paper is a request nobody can locate. The same chain in software keeps its position, its history and its accountability — and can tell the applicant where it actually is.

Government runs on records, and records law is unusually specific: what must be kept, for how long, who may see it, and what happens to it at the end. A document system for the public sector is a records system that happens to have a good editor.

A citizen-facing service has no captive audience and no training budget. It is used once, under time pressure, often on a mid-range phone over an unreliable connection, by someone who will not read instructions and cannot be asked to try again tomorrow.

Public-sector reporting has an unusual property: the number has to be defensible, and the person defending it may be doing so in front of an auditor, a legislature or the press. Provenance matters more than presentation.

Some mandates have no product that fits them. A regulator, a land registry, a licensing authority or a public utility runs on rules specific to its statute, and the honest answer is a platform built to those rules rather than a package bent around them.