And in other news, bears shown to use woods as a toilet and Pope suspected of Catholic tendencies...

I can speak from experience here. I work in Govt IT all the time.

My day to day experience is that the SRO normally never turns up, has no idea what is going on, and is doing all they can to ensure that they take no blame for anything at all. They have virtually no IT skills, they love having 3rd party contractors or outsourcers in as they can blame them if and when things go wrong.

If they are forced kicking and screaming to a meeting then they ensure that it's well packed so that if a decision is made (faint chance I know), everybody shares the blame if it goes wrong. 20 people in the room means only 5% blame each.

If they weren't there, then it was somebody elses fault.

Not sure how much research went into this work, but simply asking two or three people on the ground would have got the same results much quicker.