There were thousands of systems, and billions of lines of code, a hodgepodge of hairballs and patches and workarounds, much of it so old that nobody remembered where it came from or who created it. The government was facing the same challenge that companies are facing—that more and more of what the government does depends on software, and that, thanks to companies like Spotify, Uber, and Facebook, citizens have high standards when it comes to what their user experience should be like across the board.
