Everything you describe ultimately all comes down to management. Management set up the competing business units business plans. Management sets the operating hours. Management sets the budgets. Management set the personal count.
I've worked in the "funny-money" management world (well, under it, I suppose). It's absolutely bizarre. You're all supposed to be part of the same corporation/team but, because of accounting principles, which kind of make sense on one level but make no sense on a sort of "real world" level, you can end up sitting on your hands doing nothing because some official request hasn't come through, been signed off on, and handed off to you in some official capacity.
You may be looking right at the guy who's asking you to do something relatively simple/easy and may take all of 10minutes to accomplish, but because of the management/accounting rules you have to sit there, for perhaps days, while you want for the official request to come in.
I know that there have been things as simple as a typo on a website that took me 6 weeks to get through the official channels and finally fixed in production. Now, your thought process is likely like everyone else's: Why not just fix it and avoid the 6 week process? Sometimes you do but if you get caught, even though it makes complete sense from a business point of view (10min of work vs 6 weeks of acquisitions while you may be idle), you'll catch all sorts of hell for it if caught.
I think that the problem really boils down to the process being more important than the production. It's a management problem and, really, a business/corporation problem and there are a lot of us out in the world that have to deal with the nonsense. It's why smaller companies come out of nowhere to eat our lunch - they're busy having production (actually getting something done) being more important than process (accounting for every bolt, nut, and nail). It's why their costs are lower, even though every moment of every day isn't requisitioned for or accounted for. They get things done.
If you've never been in it, it's maddening.
I don't know how it is at WDW but imagine you're one of the custodians that cleans the trains. Train pulls into the shop and you're being paid for the next 8 hours to clean 4 trains. The problem is that someone at the resorts side of business went on vacation, had a bigger problem to solve, or whatever and forgot to send in the request (and the appropriate payment - all within the same company which is where the "funny money" bit comes in) and you're told, "We weren't requested to do this. We haven't been paid to do this. Leave the trains alone tonight." The full crew is still getting paid. The management could sort this out the next day. Instead, you stare at the trains and they go out crappy the next day... All because some process wasn't followed or fell through the cracks somewhere. From a business perspective it still cost them, in very real money, to have everyone on staff that day to clean the trains and not work, but the funny money / forms weren't passed around so there you stand.
These processes are usually put in place, here's the kicker,
to save money. I think their intentions are good, but what they really are trying to track is waste, and reduce it, and don't understand that there's a good bit of production that comes out of managed chaos. When you put these sorts of systems in place to track everything all the time then you end up with people having to account for their time 10 times an hour (every 6min) and less and less work actually gets done. You spend more time telling someone what you're doing (filling out forms, in reality) than actually getting something done.
I think there's also this thought process of: No thought. No responsibility.
If you don't do your job then, when these tightly controlled systems in place, you can almost always find something to blame it on. "I didn't get the form.. I wasn't told.." Also, the business thinks it's a benefit that you won't ever make any mistakes because everything is so controlled (like when you call a CSR and they don't think or understand what they're doing but just follow the script and you can never get your odd problem solved).
It's really a shame that this all happens but it's kind of a self-perpetuating nonsense sort of thing. Happens in governments, too. They never accept that some rule was broken or just something bad happened, nope, new regulations and laws are needed to ensure that nothing bad ever happens again.. And so it grows for both corporations and governments...
...until it collapses.
