As a former intern of the California state online services I can say that california is just playing catch up to the web revolution and it is because people in charge are lazy or un-enthusiastic about their job. 
There are too many chiefs and no enough Indians.
Work overload. They way I see it, manager keep handing the work load down the ladder and the poor employees in the bottom do most of the work. Maintaining a web presence is a team effort. It requires everybody to be in the same page.
I am going to pick on California DMV’s website.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/dmv.ca.gov
http://web.archive.org/web/*/ca.gov
According to one of the developers the was at dmv since the beginning ,whom I’ll call Ramon for the purpose of the paper, said that the website started just as a handbook page. The drivers handbook was released, Ramon says that he thought it was the coolest thing at that time. Now if you visit the archive.org site, you can see the development of the website as the years go by and more and more content was added to the page. They moved from table design to css and xhtml and so forth yet the content still kept growing. Ramon said that he was hired as a fool time and then come others. The web team at dmv stated using the early version of Adobe Dreamweaver starting with version one. The team has been using dream-weaver since the beginning and their work flow has not change much in all those years. Dev on the local drive, test site and production. With hundreds of pages to be updated monthly, the work is enormous and plain. With the California mandates to maintain a Spanish site that mirrors the English site, along with accessibility mandates, the work goes to the roof top and yet the resources available are the same. But it is no DMV’s fault for the stagnation in content management, it’s the way the system was built.
What needs to happen?
ca.gov needs to provide a way for all the departments to move all the content to databases and those databases be managed by a CMS (content management system) but databases, according to ca.gov, present a security risk and should be avoided. The system is so fragmented that it actually serves as a security barrier because no two people know how the whole things works.
- Centralized CMS
- Database support
California government needs to embrace open source, it would save tons of money and less headaches. Move away from Microsoft servers and client software, stop trying to write everything from scratch and pick up an open source project and make it better and customized. Embrace open source PHP and MySQL.
Popular CMS’
I would recommend drupal for its strong International support.
But DotNetNuke might be a better choice for the state since the state of california has a lot of money invested in Windows architecture plus DotNetNuke is very easy to manipulate.