Campaigning and governing are too very different things. One is sexy and draws the attention of very talented people for a limited period of time. The other is boring, bureaucratic, (probably) extremely frustrating.
Not really. The campaign is centered on a single objective, that of victory. the government tool has to be forward-compatible for decades to come, not to mention that it is subject to Congressional supervision and so on. If it was run like an agile development project then there'd be loud screams about the lack of accountability, process, etc. This is a 'big iron' project if ever I saw one.
Not really, neither the environments nor the personnel directly involved on software development are even remotely similar between the campaign and the executive branch.
bchjam said "Obama campaign" while you dismiss just the static website. That wasn't where the impressive IT investment in the Obama campaign was directed. You underestimate the amount of technology used for canvasing, volunteer management, exit polling, etc.
"Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js."
Campaigns are private entities designed buy a couple people to win
Governments are huge entities, with laws that look like they're there to protect public trust, but are really written to often reward key players (for this area of government).
If someone does a bad job on a campaign, he gets fired and replaced with someone that can do the job better. Campaigns run on a limited budget - they don't have all the money in the world. They have a well defined goal and strict timeline.
There's a big difference in the amount of bureaucracy needed to organize thousands of volunteers doing one thing versus millions of employees doing an uncountable number of things.