I used to architect solutions used by the social services and those concepts of data integrity, security, guaranteed deliveries etc. are something I came across everyday, and I think those same aspects are valid in public enterprises. The fact some people ignore those points doesn't make them less valid. And it doesn't change the fact that a failure in government IT is 100 million pounds and private startup failure can range between just lost time to a few millions private/VC money: calculated risk (usually, I know there are exceptions like boo.com :)