I noticed the same differences since I'm a "weekend warrior" with the government and work in the private sector during the week.  The best theory I can come up with is that to succeed in the private sector a business has to be proactive -- anticipating and dealing with issues before they become big issues.  Government is mostly reactive -- for the most part they have to react to existing conditions after they're already big issues.

Of course that's a good thing, since most people wouldn't want the police kicking in their door for some crime they anticipate you'll commit at some point ("Minority Report" anyone?)

BTW - I noticed in the rankings that they assign a "knowledge value per employee", but it doesn't appear to single out groups of employees (i.e., IT, marketing, etc.)  According to this ranking, the guy who says "Would you like fries with that?" contributes as much to Burger King's "smartness" as the guy who administers their distributed database servers, who contributes as much as the VP of Sales, etc.

This ranking doesn't seem to really measure IT-related activities and employees specifically.  It's hard to directly measure the value of good IT people in most companies, since we don't usually do sales, marketing, etc.  Basically we don't usually contribute directly to the bottom line (of course there are always exceptions, and really big ones at that).  We do, however, always support the decision makers and the people who do contribute to the bottom line.  It would be far more interesting to me to see a methodology for measuring the impact that IT departments have on businesses.