Having worked with public sector data in Denmark this part is particularly hilarious to encounter in the wild. Even something as “simple” as an organisational chart is something will multiple realities depending on who you ask. Often the people working within context of the different realities will be quite fanatical about their reality.
The place I worked had an employee registry which became the foundation for more and more purposes as the digital services grew. Typically being the foundation for rights to the 300+ different IT systems. It was based on the payment system, which was sort of natural when it was build because that is the one place every employee is registered. Of course this became an issue. For one, teams can only have one manager in basically every Danish HR system, I’m not sure why that is, because a lot of teams have multiple managers performing different roles. Sometimes some of the manager roles where delegated, sometimes the responsibilities were simply spilt. In any case, because there was no data on this hierarchy it was hilariously hard to do things like default who would have access rights to approving vacation, audit and so on. Then you had healthcare, which works three shifts with a different amount of people on each shift. Especially the night shift was a challenge, because they needed access to the whole house and every patient. Which might’ve been easy if there was a regular night shift team, but heathcare personal rotate shifts. Even the specifically designed patient registry which was solely build for patient care couldn’t handle this because nobody had thought about it before they build it (or the data laws like GDPR).
Anyway, there was a billion different things where data didn’t represent a single reality. I can’t get into the stuff involving citizens, but let’s just say that it will be horrible when different departments use the data with AI as though their own reality is the only reality.