I'm not sure if we are still allowed to complain about the hallowed City of Minneapolis and its valiant phalanx of dedicated, professional, ruggedly handsome public servants, but I can't resist quoting something from the page twincitizen linked to:
The maps included on this site were created by Jim Dahlseid, City of Minneapolis Traffic & Parking Services Division.
One might find this curious in light of the fact that the City also has a GIS department:
http://www.minneapolismn.gov/maps/about_maps_gis-main
Apparently one of the City's tentacles finds the services of another tentacle so unappealing, either in price or quality, that it chooses instead to reproduce those services itself. I know that this forum in addition to armchair planners, architects, and traffic engineers, also boasts armchair economists, one of whom may be able to explain the concept of perverse outcomes.
For what it's worth, the vast majority of city employees (confusingly) make no distinction between the words department/division/section/office/etc (or, for that matter, supervisor/manager/director/etc) and so a lot of time the things you see and hear about bureaucracy aren't 100% what they appear to be at first. For example, there is no GIS department, a list of departments can be found
here. GIS is (probably?) a division/section/office/etc with the Information Technology Department, which in that link is listed with its old name, Business Information Services. There are employees who kind of split time between departments and work on projects that have to do with multiple departments.
Having worked for a couple different large organizations in my life, most people have a tendency to label individual functions as "departments", which is then interpreted as some
big thing with lots of desks and ringing phones and carts with papers and whatnot, when really, it's just the one person you're talking to on the phone.
Which isn't to say that the specific example you're talking about isn't actually an example of overlap, because I have no idea, but I felt like clarifying.