Most people have no idea what goes on in their local government office, because they don’t work for the government. You can have some idea how the department of motor vehicles operates, but you don’t know what really goes on inside those offices. You just see the part that faces the public. The people inside know about the computer systems, the people who do nothing but take up space and the the ridiculous managers and supervisors who fill their days with busy work and pointless meetings.

The revers is true as well. The people working in government offices have no idea what happens in the dreaded private sector. Most government workers and just about all managers have never worked in the private sector, outside of college jobs. They don’t know about the drive for efficiency, cost cutting, and profit margins. They don’t know what it is like to keep the computer software up to date so the company can maintain its competitive edge and continue to reduce costs, by reducing labor.

The reason this matters is when the government decides they are going to increase the the number of interfaces between the government and the dreaded private sector, it means increased opportunities for a clash of cultures and technologies. The culture within the government office, for example, is never going to blend well with the culture inside a private business. Similarly, the technology and process are never going to interface smoothly with those in the private sector. There’s going to be problems.

This is what is happening with the ObamaCare exchanges. In government, IT projects are as mostly about rewarding favored companies in specific districts. They eventually get done and generally work, but they are never intended to reduce costs or lower the number of people in the government office. In the private sector, technology is a tool to cut people and costs, but often a tool to defend against mischief. Trying to bring government IT systems into the retail space, is like putting government workers in the private sector.

Now, the reason all of our government systems have not been compromised is they are not exposed to the world. Most people are unaware of the alternative “internet” used by security forces, but it exists and it used by national security, diplomats and parts of government. Secure communication channels are essential. More often, government systems are simply so old, they can’t be accessed over the internet.  There are plenty of government systems running COBOL applications to this day.

This initiative to upgrade these government systems so they can interface with the private sector systems sounds good in theory, but that’s where the culture problem comes into the mix. Since none of these legacy systems were written by people contemplating the Internet, they have nothing more than old school password security. By exposing them to the internet, bad actors can now quickly crack the security and get into the back-end systems where the sensitive data is stored. The whole system is now exposed.