Your post just made my point perfectly. Your experience has allowed you to do your job better. That's the point. O'Reilly is a book publisher and a pundit whose pulling together bloggers to have a Government 2.0 conference which he thinks will somehow solve the problem because, imho, he has no idea how to actually solve the problem. I mean, this is a guy who lists coining Web 2.0 as one of his accomplishments in life
On the other hand someone who actually does this sort of thing for a living and has experience would realize what the problems are and be able to address them appropriately.
"Your experience has allowed you to do your job better. [...] O'Reilly is a [...] pundit"
Well the thing about pundits is, they know people, and people listen to them. Now don't get me wrong - I see inefficiencies in IT infrastructure everywhere I look - government, healthcare, even large areas of science - but nobody asks me my opinion. Maybe if O'Reilly could inflict me on those people for a couple of hours, they would learn something.
[for "me", read "people in our position", not personally me]
I have a lot of sympathy for what I think you are saying - that certain classes of people have a gift for self-promotion and get a lot more credit for things instead of the real technical/systems talent, which makes us feel they don't "deserve" it, but that doesn't mean they bring zero to the table, either.
On the other hand someone who actually does this sort of thing for a living and has experience would realize what the problems are and be able to address them appropriately.