Government is a set of laws federal, state and local, nothing is the same. Also a policy is local to the area. When you get into information that also varies,

Government is a set of laws federal, state and local, nothing is the same. Also a policy is local to the area. When you get into information that also varies, for one reason or another governments use different systems computer and otherwise. A lot of government collaboration is working out how these similar but dissimilar systems will operate. What works for say Los Angeles certainly doesn't work for San Andreas and visa versa, and it gets even weirder if you cross state lines. A respectable goal is to work up universal data interchange standards, not set systems, but say a "record" of a law should contain minimally certain information in certain text standards, etc. This leaves the municipalities to still work with their preferred systems but when doing cross-government business everyone know what data to expect minimally. The downside of this is sometimes some entities are bad players and vote for bad data rules (i.e. the ever dwindling census detail) which benefit them in one way or another.